A Veritable Kingdom, This Army of Mothers
I remember vividly the first time I took my five-week-old daughter for a walk to Battersea Park. Among her early milestones, this would be the most grand, the true triumph. Because a walk to Battersea suggested the return to normalcy that I craved.
A return to normalcy, as if such a leprechaun exists when you become a mother.
Before Clementine was born my husband and I would take daily--sometimes twice-daily--walks to Battersea Park, just over the River Thames from our flat. We’d wander under a canopy of elms and oaks, or past the duck ponds, or to the Mr. Whippy truck for an ice cream. Time was open before us, spacious and accommodating. We could fill it how we pleased and go where we wanted. We could explore, we could talk about our hopes and dreams until we were tired, or we could talk about inconsiderate dog owners, or German supermarket chains, and then head home when we had our fill. Or, when it began raining. They usually happened at the same time.
The first walk-alone-with-the-baby to Battersea was on a January morning, sometime around eight o’clock, frigid and wet and dreary. London is especially gloomy in January. What with its 4 pm sunsets and near constant rain and a liquid cold that seeps into your bones the way snow-cold cannot. Still recovering from an emergency C- section, to say that I was tired was an understatement. I was, at the British say, shattered. But if I had to stare at our desk and sideboard for one more second I was going to explode.
This would be the furthest I’d been from our lounge with just the baby in six weeks. Each step set a pang of discomfort through my groin. As far as bodily sensations go I don’t recommend it. Clementine was bundled up in a pile of blankets and secured below a rain cover and an umbrella and god knows whatever foul accoutrements a stroller in the United Kingdom requires. We could do this, I told myself. We had this.
We crossed Chelsea Bridge with its red buses and maniacal cyclists whizzing by. I rubbed my belly, now mostly deflated, and marveled at how un-pregnant I felt. It wasn’t just a transformation in my body. Just a few short weeks ago, my fat-ass received no shortage of honks and waves whenever I left the house, or warm smiles from total strangers, or “‘oh darling please go ahead”’ in the check-out line or “‘oh do take my seat”’ on the Tube. Now that I had crossed the threshold into motherhood, had wrangled a baby out of my bleeding, torn body, had learned to feed and clothe and bathe it (sort of) along with all kinds of other Olympian feats, and was exhausted beyond anything pregnancy had thrown at me, and lonely, and was venturing out to the park for the first time just to be around other people doing “‘normal”’ things, well.
I felt totally invisible.
No honks, no waves, just a frustrated look from an oncoming runner on the pavement (sidewalk) at the size of our 16- wheeler of a baby stroller. The post-pregnancy complete 180 that the entire world seemed to pull threw me for quite a spin.
When we entered the park past the familiar black and gold gates I thought: oh. my. god. I am tired. A short walk that normally felt as effortless as breathing had become a marathon. But I would not turn back. A mantra unearthed itself from the abyss of my sleep-deprived, half sane mind: purchase coffee in public purchase coffee in public purchase coffee in public.
Huh, I thought. I could get a coffee?
And then I had a realization. I was so unpracticed that it took a moment to see that a coffee was out of the question. Why? Oh, non-mothers. Because I would need both hands to steer our monstrosity of a stroller! And we didn’t have the one accessory that I now know is essential: the cup holder. Shit. Shit. Shit.Shitty shitty bang bang. The kiosk smelled intoxicating.; The barrista actually waved, which never happens, like, ever, because, well, England. But I had to press on. Waddle on. Limp on. Whatever you want to call it, however you’d describe a female human with a slowly wilting butternut squash shaped torso hobbling in the freezing rain wearing a half-way buttoned leopard print coat and pushing a plastic-incubated baby human.
So I turned and moved along, slowly, with attention to my lower abdomen. I listened to the sound of the geese and swans quarreling. The crunch of acorns and wet twigs below the then-newish stroller wheels. I looked at Clementine of course, who seemed absolutely taken by her surroundings, the tangle of black bare branches above, the assembly of wanton crows angling toward crisp wrappers and the banks of the river. Rather than fall asleep, she was wide awake, transfixed by a torn Tesco bag flapping in the wind.
That’s when I started to notice. At first it was just one. Then another, and another.
Soon I scanned the park and realized with few exceptions, the place was overrun with them.
With us, I should say.
With moms. Mums.
We were everywhere. There was one mother in particular, swallowed by a hooded gold puff parka, her face almost hidden even at a close distance. One of her children, three- years- old, was doing the halfway-to-a-tantrum sideways walk and stutter in front of her, beginning to work himself into a frenzy judging by the length of the gaps between his piercing whines. Another child was strapped to the mother’s chest, wriggling like a crazed paramecium. Yet another was in the stroller she pushed, not visible from where I was standing, but audible, crying about something something juice something Peppa Pig not George something I want it now.
The new motherhood shock-tail of anxiety, alarm reflexes, and the inevitable desire to want to run away and hide in a bathroom stall flooded me. And they weren’t even my kids! I could tell that this mother was at her limit. She had the familiar blank stare, the frozen resignation that comes from the inability to escape so much demand and need. We made eye-contact, this mother and I. To my surprise, she did a long distance fist-pump wave. And then she continued to trudge on with her three children and their black hole vortex chorus of anti-fun.
I walked on mulling over the nonverbal exchange with this mother. And the fact of the dozens of other moms in the park. It was hard to comprehend how much exhaustion and hard, soul-crushing work was happening in those hectares of London that morning. Mothers, I thought to myself. I watched every single person walk by and thought: they had a mother, or something very like a mother, someone that fed them, nursed them, changed their diapers, spent hours upon hours upon hours dealing with their capricious and violent moods, their whims, their neediness-without-anything-in-return. Someone gave up hours and hours of her own pleasure to do it.
Sure, motherhood has rewarding moments. But in the first few years, it’s moments: not hours, not afternoons, not days.
I read recently that until children are school-age, really you can call it a success if you as a mother enjoyed about ten minutes of the day.
But people can’t live on scraps alone. You’d think?
Even more extraordinary than my calculation about how much blood, sweat, and deep breathing was happening inside Battersea Park that morning was my admission that until I’d become one, I hadn’t noticed all the primal intensity of the lives of mothers around me.
I hadn’t given mothers in the park a second thought during my previous walks. Other than to think that they looked sweet, symbols of nurture and early childhood. Which, until then, meant my early childhood, or a hypothetical early childhood of a ‘future child,’ not the one I was now responsible for during every second of her life (waking or sleeping).
How could I have been so blind? How could I not have noticed this army hiding in plain sight, fighting in the trenches every day, all day, right in front of me? How?
At that moment a thought descended on me, landing like a damp leaf.
If an army could be hidden in plain sight, a real, fierce, life-or-death army that I simply never noticed or cared to notice before, then so could the Kingdom of God. Unseen, but real and powerful, layered within the world I inhabit whether I care to acknowledge it or not.
The thing with God is that God seems more like an abstraction or a concept than a Someone in these early days of mothering, when my own desire for meaning in the mundane is so visceral but often deeply unfulfilled. God amounts to the one I’d experienced a great deal in the past but has since become reclusive and removed. As a result I feel a bit sad, a bit confused, and a bit of nothing.
Besides, a mother doesn’t have much emotional bandwidth to think about spiritual things with a new-born around. Or with a toddler for that matter.
But that day in Battersea Park got me thinking. Repent, Jesus says, for the Kingdom of God is at hand. I always thought that sounded manipulative and threatening. But repent just means to change direction. It doesn’t mean that everything was horrible before. It doesn’t mean that everything ahead won’t be horrible. It just means to change direction: left, right, southwest, northeast, wherever. Just change. Change because perhaps there’s a different way of doing things. Try casting your net on the other side of the boat, just for kicks. Change because there’s a reality, an entire Kingdom, a totally different set of principles and values for living well, right in front of you, hiding in plain sight, and it means everything for the fatigue you feel now.
Perhaps you are numb. Perhaps you don’t see anything at all when you search for a kingdom in the ordinary confines of your life. Maybe a leaf is just a leaf, a sunset just a sunset. No meaning infused. No greater truth hidden in longings and in moments of captivated attention. But the thing is, I hadn’t noticed moms. Despite how strongly I felt I wanted to be one, how deeply motherhood haunted my desires and my emotional landscape. Still, for decades, I hadn’t really seen them. My emotions and drives, were, per usual, powerful but limited. And not always terrific indicators of what actually matters or what is true. Or what is even there.
So it goes, perhaps, for the kingdom, to my great relief. It’s quite possible that it is there, despite my perception or my numbness.
A kingdom hiding in plain sight, like these miraculous moms doing bloody hard work all day every day in broad daylight.