Mother, Visitor

It’s early, still dark, and the house is quiet. I made coffee, store brand, but it’ll do the trick. I hear the baby wake, drowsily vexed before realizing he’s right where he needs to be, boob-level, and sinking back into sleep in his parents’ bed between them, the littlest pea in the pod.

We came down to North Carolina for Halloween and to see our daughters and their partners and our dinosaur grandson. He is nearly two and besotted with the power of no, deliberate in his Brio train track construction. The joy he provides is uncomplicated. But seeing the bonds my daughters and their families have created, or found, and actively reinforce in this place 700 miles away brings up a happiness equally intense but way more nuanced.

When I’m with them, of course, we are each other’s, but basically they operate as planets independent of my orbit. I think about terrible and sad ways the world works; and to watch them find their rhythm in a rich life they’ve built somewhere else, as opposed to an ideology, violence, addiction, loneliness...

We should all be so lucky, to relinquish our children to a network of love.