The Endless Pivot

Plot twist: it wasn't just the butterflies

Photo by Jensen Ragoonath // Unsplash

Sunday night. I'm inside a butterfly hatching tent my friend Lorena built at her farm. We're oohing and ahhing at all of the shimmering green chrysalises hanging from the ceiling, the fat caterpillars eating leaves like The Very Hungry Caterpillar come to life, and the gorgeous monarch perched on a friend's finger eating watermelon.

And then I feel something in my hair.

And I pick it out.

It's a bug. A much less cute bug than this beautiful butterfly.

Yep, you guessed it.
Lice.
For the first time since I was probably 5 years old.

So here's the context: after a full summer of multiple family dance camps (we really love dancing in my fam) and a mix of day camps that I wish I could’ve gone to (Make a movie! Book arts! Forest camp in the ecovillage!), I'd left my older daughter out of camps for the last few weeks of summer.

I wanted her to sleep in and ride her bike around the village and spend hours in the pond, and sometimes just be vaguely bored like I was as a kid.

It worked out, but by the time the first week of school rolled around, I was ready.

Granted, it was just a half-week, but I was SO excited to have some space to myself again. And the bigger deal was that her little sister was starting her first week of ecovillage toddler school–3 mornings a week with her two little besties in the village.

Both kids at school for the first time!!!

(Ok, one of them for just 3 hours. But still.)

I was sooo excited.

And of course, the lice wasn't just me. A quick check confirmed that both girls had it.

Instead of going to bed early and getting ready for our toddler's big day, we were up until midnight, crowded into the downstairs bathroom (best light) treating our heads.

(Picture me sitting on the toilet lid, nursing for what felt like hours, while my husband combed through our toddler’s soft auburn curls.)

And no surprise, my neighbor decided to postpone the start of baby school for a week while we got the lice thing under control.

Womp womp.

It's not like being with my kiddo on a Monday morning is that hard. I've been doing it for the past 2 years. She slept late and we all had a sweet morning together.

But it's the immediate pivot that kills me sometimes.

Motherhood is giving and giving and giving. This endless focus on everyone else's needs.

And then there's a moment when I think I'm going to get some time for myself. It's like a part of me starts to come back online, the part who remembers that I have my own desires, who gets excited about being with myself and diving into my own whole other world.

She's about to step into the whole other world.

And then SLAM.

The door gets shut in her face.

Those moments undo me.

Like the weekend a while back when my partner was away and I told myself all I needed was a shower, and then the baby didn't nap. All day. Which had literally never happened before. OMG I wanted to die.

And you might be wondering, don't you live in an ecovillage? Don't you have neighbors lining up outside your door, just begging to hang out with your kids so you can make herbal tinctures all day?

Well, yes, and no. People here often help with the kiddos. But when I'm totally triggered because I've been trying to get the baby to nap for over an hour and my nipples hurt so much I’m crying, I don't always remember to reach out.

Or when we all have lice, and not everyone wants to get all up in our family.

And in a lot of ways, it's not even about whether or not I can get back-up. It's just that moment of having to let go of the thing I really wanted for myself. To surrender, once again.

It's one of the greatest practices and teachings of parenthood. Surrender, surrender, surrender to what is.

(And I say this as someone with two kids who are relatively good sleepers. I know sleep deprivation, but not like some of my friends. You’re all heroes.)

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Surrender is fucking hard.

And this endless surrender? It's teaching me something deep about how life actually works. About change.

There's the thing we want, the thing we're attached to. And then we have to let it go.

It's showing me how to live in this world with its unpredictability, the inevitability of death, all the heartache that comes. Parenting really is one of the most intense schools of life.

But I have no interest in doing some kind of spiritual bypassing where I pretend to be grateful for every lesson.

Fuck no.

There are moments when I can truly pivot with grace and feel like I'm getting the hang of this. I can feel my growth and my resilience.

And there are other moments where it destroys me. With all the work I've done on myself, all my spiritual practice, all my intentions–and I'm still a puddle because my baby didn't nap.

That's the tension we live with as mothers. Between spiritual practice and being completely undone by life's small disasters. Between wanting to grow and also wanting to rage at how unfair it all feels.

Motherhood strips away any illusion that I can control life or that growth happens in a straight line. It keeps showing me this essential part of what it means to be human: to want things, to lose them, to have to keep going anyway.

To find my way back to myself, again and again. And again.

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p.s. If your September includes both school drop-off and nit combing, solidarity. Hit me up if you need any tips.