My Mother Watched Me Leave.

I have two memories of the first time I truly left my mother.

Of course, childhood is one long leaving: to school, to friends’ houses, to books and movies she hasn’t seen, to new ideas she never thought of.

But I mean the bigger leaving, the time when you go out into the world as a newly minted adult. In my case, I moved to Germany at eighteen to be an au pair for a family I had never met, four months after graduating high school. My mother’s most often recited memory of the time I left her is that everyone asked her, “How (or why???) did you let her go?????” and my mother always laughs and says, “LET her??? She bought her own plane ticket! What was I supposed to do?”

But my memories of leaving my mother are two bookends:

The day in August when she took me to the airport, my suitcase much overloaded for nine months away. At airport security, I turned back just for one moment to look at my mother, and she had tears in her eyes. Watching me walk away. Brave mother, to, yes, indeed, let me go, however she might describe it.

Second bookend: the day in May when I came back. She picked me up from the airport, took me to lunch. The waiter came to take our order, I told him confidently what I would like, asked him a question or two about the menu. When he left, I looked at my mother, and she was gazing at me with surprise. Can’t say I blame her: before I left, like most teenagers, I would never make a phone call and never look a stranger in the eye. Brave mother, to let me change, to let me feel and experience things on the other side of the world, to grow and stretch, without her. To witness me in how I had changed when I was apart.

These bookends contain multitudes of polar emotions: love and release, trust and surprise, coming and going, knowing and unknown. My mother is always my mother, and so we will always share a heartbeat. My mother is always my mother, and so, just as my cells divided from hers in the womb, I will always divide from her. Just as a biological fact, and an emotional one, too.

I’ve got a tiny creature growing in me whose cells are dividing from mine right now. Already, I find these mother-waves of together/apart, together/apart rocking me.

I told Spencer that my experience of gestating motherhood has been one of profound alienation. I was so sick for months. When you’re sick like that, it would be actual insanity to feel warmly towards the thing making you sick. Some women manage to find and embody this insanity. I never quite managed it, but neither did I cause harm to growing baby. I may not yet feel love, but I can manage to feel responsibility. I’ll take the damn prenatals; I’ll go to the checkups; I’ll worry when I think I might be losing you. Motherhood, together: you and me, baby. It’s not your fault that your dependence on me is making me profoundly ill. You are so tiny. You are so vulnerable. You take and take and take from me, my actual life force, because through no fault of your own, we are together, we are one, we are the same being. Motherhood, apart: but I do still exist separate from you, I still want things that you don’t want, I need things that you don’t need, I have to find a way to survive as more than a body for you, more than together.

A few weeks ago, on Trinity Sunday, the day Episcopalians celebrate the mystery of the oneness of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, the triune God, three in one, Lon preached the Trinity as “the one who gives, the one who receives, and the love between them.”

The one who gives, the one who receives, and the love between them.

I’ve never had clearer evidence that God is a woman. Who else than a woman could so profoundly comprehend what it means to be both separate and apart? To be both giver and receiver. And in awe of whatever mystery flows between, something unknowable, unnameable, some gift.

This week, week 17, my baby begins to be able to perceive my voice. Baby can hear my voice resonating through my body, through the womb. I sang a favorite song while I was driving today. I usually sing it and think about my dearest friends. I’ve been practicing how to love with them for years. I smiled to think of baby hearing it through my body for the very first time.

It's hard to find
What is true
In faded lines
But then there's you

If I don't do anything else
I just wanna love you well

And again:

If I don't do anything else
I just wanna love you well
Love you well, love you well

When I told Spencer about my feeling of alienation, Spencer told me about this blindness retreat he went on this summer. Literally, you show up at a house and all the lights are off, and you can’t see anyone, and they bring you your meals in the dark, and you do this for a week. He said by the end of the week, he was hallucinating, having visions. “Maybe,” he said, “in an experience like this, you might feel closer to baby.” Baby currently in the dark womb. Baby who can’t even imagine what light might be.

I think Spencer might be right: that in thinking of this experience, I might come closer to baby. I might be more easily able to love you well. We’re separate, you and me, baby. I’m the giver; you are the receiver. I’m outside, you’re in. You’re tiny, I’m big. I know what the light is, and you have so much yet to experience. But we’re also together. Oh my, we are so together. What happens to you happens to me; what happens to me happens to you. Finding our way through the dark. Figuring out what all of this means. I’ll do it my way, you do it yours, our different needs and stages of growth, but here we are. Hearts beating as one. I sing you a song, and the scientists say your heart slows down. My voice is the first thing you’ll ever hear, and that means I’m always your mother. Always apart. Always together.