in the in-between

The last time I had breakfast at Lou’s in the town of my alma mater, we were with my husband’s friend and his family. Their two-year old sat in my lap and shyly held my hand…until he became a monster, yelling and screaming, throwing things and hitting. The adults looked at each other with fear in our eyes.

Later in the trip, my sister-in-law asked to speak to me about my experience with IVF, because, she said, she was considering it. We had frozen embryos earlier that year, as an insurance policy, and though it was one of the most miserable months of my life, I was an advocate of preserving optionality. Curiously, minutes into our conversation, she began to tell me that children ruined her friends’ marriages and that she increasingly thought that they were a mistake. Still, I was earnest: what’s the harm? And what if you meet the love of your life and he wants children? She said something to the effect that the love of her life wouldn’t want children.

That was my last trip to Vermont without my son. The following spring, I was pregnant. Vermont, snow-covered and sleepy, feels frozen in time from November to April. It still feels like the holiday season here, with frozen ponds and wreathes above garages and wild turkeys roaming white plains. My son is sweet and free-spirited. He sings Who Lets the Dogs Out and sway-dances to John Denver. He is nothing like what I feared and nothing like what I imagined. There’s an indescribable joy in witnessing his personality bloom; there’s an unwarranted pride, too, in watching nature run its course—a nature that I, ultimately, had little to do with.

I think to myself that he is truly one of a kind, then wonder if every mother feels this way about their children—if every child is one of a kind. Motherhood is funny that way. It feels so specific, so distinct and individual, and yet, there are two billion of us, one of humanity’s most common threads.

One of the first nights of this trip, we had old family friends over for dinner. The husband is a renowned photographer, the wife a painter and later-in-life poet. She asked me a couple times what I’ve been writing. “You must have a lot of material now,” she said, referencing the unfolding of this additional dimension of my identity. I deflected. The truth is, my writing has been directionless and my dreams have been uncertain. There is a storm of thoughts and feelings within me that have yet to take coherent shape. In the meantime, I’ve been following rhythms both internal and external, negotiating the tension and the space of what it means to be a family, what it means to know, in my marrow now, that something other than oneself is real.1

I think this season is a lesson in being two things at once. I oscillate between being myself and being someone for someone else. The odd thing is, I have nostalgia for the present-day, for this in-between. We’re not quite young anymore, and not quite old yet. We’ve settled into who we are, and yet I feel estranged from the girl who had breakfast at Lou’s three years ago. I wore eyeliner then, and knew so much less of my body and of my heart. We’ve more or less made sense of our lives, and yet, there remain unanswered question and decisions to be made. Where life will take us—me—seems softly paved; the future, loosely held.

Can it be possible to hold onto your vision for your life and still let yourself be untethered? I want to remain soft around the edges and open to the uncontrived. I want the world and it still seems possible to have it.

I think a lot about the quote toward the end of Boyhood, when the mother, played by Patricia Arquette, says, “I just thought there would be more.” Since watching that movie in my 20s, I’ve lived my life, I think, in avoidance of that sentiment. And, when I’m holding Eliot’s hand as he falls asleep, when he says to me sleepily, “Mommy? I love you,” I’m overcome with the tender certainty that, if this is all there is, that would be more than enough.