There is Only Always By Laura J. Oliver

My former boss Mike didn’t speak a word until he was three, his first words a complete sentence, pointedly addressed to a gushing relative.

“Put me down.”

I spoke earlier, I tell him, laughing. Not a complete sentence but a cry for help.

My mother had placed me on the center of two Jenny Lind twin beds, which she’d pushed together to appear as if they were a single full bed, thinking I couldn’t roll off either side while she was out of the room. This auspicious event took place in the tree-lined neighborhood of Webster Groves, St. Louis, Missouri, where I was born.

But after she left the room, the beds slipped apart, and I fell to the floor beneath them. When she returned, a quick peek beneath the white dust ruffle revealed a startled baby with the wind knocked out of her. I don’t know if I was studying the boxsprings above me or had turned to her voice, but at that moment, I said, ‘mama’ for the first time.

They say we remember little from before the age of three because we don’t have language to narrate our feelings or to give shape to experience. In those first years, we also exist in infant time. We have no concept of before, after, later, or momentary. Under that bed, I would have thought alone was forever.

Without meaning to, 36 years later, I’d inflict a similar experience on a child of my own.

Mr. Oliver and I wanted to get away by ourselves. Maybe because we thought we were supposed to want that—date nights, vacations without the three kids. Is it wrong that I don’t think we sincerely pined for these things? We enjoyed our lives. I was a writer, he, a naval architect, but without any examples in my life of how to be married before I got married, I was trying on everyone else’s suggestions.
So, we booked a weekend getaway to Buckeystown, Maryland. Not lying when I say I’m not a planner. My search filter must have been a highly non-selective “two-hour drive of home.” The little Inn appeared charming online, but note to self, zoom out, and look at the big picture before giving nonrefundable credit card info based on one photo.

We asked the parents of our two older kids’ best friends to take them overnight, then asked my mother to spend the night with Emily, who was about 16 months old.

We kissed her goodbye, made promises she could not possibly understand, and Mr. Oliver and I threw a suitcase in the Volvo and set off on our adventure. We were a little dismayed when we got to our romantic getaway and saw the discrepancy between what we had been anticipating and reality. Still, if you subtracted the graveyard and Shell station, it was a sweet place.

Our room was lovely, and that evening, we had dinner with other guests in the Inn’s dining room. Everyone was quite interesting, especially the woman with the short, curly brown hair and sweet smile, who announced with bright-eyed, good cheer that she was staying at the Inn because her home was plagued by Poltergeist. It made her by far the most interesting person at the table and almost the most memorable thing about our time alone. We enjoyed our obligatory sleep away from the kids we adored, then drove home to relieve my mother the following day.

When we drove up the lane, Mom met us on the deck. She had aged a decade. She looked like she did just after cataract surgery—her hair was wild, her face white and shell-shocked. Inside, there were weird tracks in the carpet.

Unbeknownst to us, Emily had sobbed inconsolably the entire time we were gone. All night. The tracks in the rugs were from Mom strapping Emly into an umbrella stroller at 3:00 am and trudging through the house in circles for hours asleep on her feet in an effort to comfort a grief-stricken baby.

That’s when I realized that Emly had been on infant time. We were not gone for the weekend. We were gone for all time. In an instant, we had ceased to exist, and not just her parents had disappeared, so had her brother and sister. Her entire family had vanished. Poof! Gone.

Is it wrong that I still want to make this right?
A friend with an addiction blog wrote recently of a mother who went into instant overdrive when her recovering addict son ran out of a medication that was nationally in short supply. Mom put on her superhero cape and spent every ounce of energy, influence, and concentration calling, searching, and beseeching until she procured the missing medication.

Change the names, and I’m that mother— and it makes me wonder, is motherhood an addiction? An irreparable, biological change in our DNA—a condition that once activated, we need to supply to feel complete? We can respect their privacy, their abilities, and their autonomy, but do we stop wanting to solve our kids’ problems, to heal them, protect them, ease their pain? Even retroactively?

Because apparently the passage of time is irrelevant. For me, motherhood is a condition of infant time.

Understand that I was, and am, an imperfect mother. But I don’t interfere in my kids’ lives. I respect distance and independence. I have facilitated and nurtured two of the three living on other continents for most of their adult lives because it is what they wanted. I have never in my life dropped by uninvited. Not once. I don’t even sit down uninvited. I don’t hesitate when asked for help, but I don’t intrude. I don’t assume they want to hear from me. But.

Did you know that for most people, by the time your kids are 18, you will have had 93% of all the facetime you will ever have with them? That’s a factoid I don’t love.

Sometimes, I’ll be holding an avocado at Whole Foods or crossing the Bay Bridge and I’ll be overcome with a visceral sense of emptiness, a longing so pervasive it feels almost existential but it’s not. It’s simply a hunger for the kids. I’ll realize it’s been a while, and I just need to lay eyes on them.

My son adopted a rescue dog that came up from some floods in Texas. Nala was a new mother, a beautiful mixed breed with a sweet face, soulful brown eyes, and 8 puppies when they found her. But her caretakers took her puppies away, spayed her, and adopted her out. To this day, she tenderly carries balled socks to a safe bed in the corner of the living room. She gently tugs them out of my son’s hands as he walks by, forever retrieving and nurturing the babies that so inexplicably disappeared.
And they do disappear. As kids grow up, they are gone long before they leave.

I will never be who I was before having children because, in motherhood, there is no after, later, or momentary.

There is only always.

Happy Mother’s Day, beloveds. Happy Mother’s Day.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.