TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown. 

If you have children, even if they are adults now, you probably remember the time when it felt like too much. Those early months are brutal, emotionally and physically. Your body is not your own, your space is not your own, your sleep is not your own. Even your own mind feels co-opted by the new baby. When I think back to those early days, months and years of having a baby, or a baby and a toddler at the same time — I know I felt overwhelmed, but I can’t remember how I felt. I can barely conjure the physicality of that exhaustion. I think our minds protect us, so that we have the courage to do it again. 

I hope I don’t sound like I’m complaining, or like I’m advising people against having children. I’m not! My kids are the loves of my life. I am so glad they’re here, and that we’re together. I am also so very glad they’re teenagers now and not newborns. I’m glad they put themselves to bed at night, and can get themselves a drink if they’re thirsty, and can tell me how they feel so I don’t have to worry and guess.

There were times when mothering felt overwhelming. I’m so glad we got through the too-muchness to get to this place. Now, I always want more of them. It’s funny how that works, isn’t it? For years I craved more freedom, more independence, and then, when I got it, part of me missed being so needed. 

Today’s poem captures the too-muchness of motherhood, especially in those years with very young children — and the desire for freedom, even if that freedom is only imagined. Of course, as a mother of teens, I want to tell the speaker that freedom is coming.

The Crux
by Megan Peak

When, at the end of the week, one child’s body
is ribboned with fever and the other’s is sleepless

unless cocooned under my breast, I say enough.
I say enough, and when my husband asks enough

of what, I make a list in my head. An endless list
of enoughs: the cycle of uncurable colds plaguing

our house, the dog’s piss spots on the carpet, another day
where I’m lost in my body, when my name isn’t Megan but

Mom or Mommy. What’s more repetitive than the wail
of a newborn, the tantrums of a human becoming more

human? Love maybe? Grief? Isn’t that the crux
of motherhood — the knot of loving and grieving

and loving and grieving all the selves lived and unlived?
Of course, I’m nowhere close to having an answer for him

when the babe nods off, milk driveling into the cushion
of her neck. O, god, some days I think I’ve made the biggest 

mistake bringing children here. Here where I save up
my sadness, stash it under mattresses and in sock drawers.

Here where I moonlight as someone else entirely, where
given the chance, I’d hop the train that roars through

my mind each night without looking back.

"The Crux" by Megan Peak. Used by permission of the poet.