Homecoming

It's always overwhelming, 2 days of a different life, a different me. One who doesn't tell bedtime stories or do the dishes, one who doesn't rub glitter on knees because it is 'fairy powder' and the biggest lie in all of maternal history but for some reason I've come to terms with the fact that I will never again be young, enough, perfectly wiling to want happiness and comfort enough to understand the magic behind, it is the only think that can make a 5 year old girl, nearly 6, think a growing pain doesn't hurt anymore. I go out late. I dress like a brazen hussy. For a few weeks in there I even kissed boys without worry of the sitter (that is over now, mind you-- seems it's hard to tell a girl you're not interested anymore when your tongue is in her mouth, but luckily, this girl knows to ask. Via text.). I drink red bull, I stay busy, I watch slasher films in the middle of the day and blare Liz Phair and They Might Be Giants until the windows shake to spite the Gin-Blossom rocking mullet lady downstairs.

And then, I go to bed alone, and I cry a little bit because this isn't me anymore-- I am not a girl who hangs out in bars and makes vapid chitchat and intrigues with little substance and much charm... I am more (now), my life is bigger (now)... I am not also a mother, I am a mother first and all else on the side. But the Indiana State Visitation guidelines insist that every 21 days I not look into my own eyes on a smaller face, marvel at the little girl that has her fathers mouth but wears my smile... that I assume another identity.

And I don't mind the break. I don't mind the monthly atmosphere of freaky holiday, I even look forward to it sometimes. But there are these times, the longer stretches like Spring Break, that I fear it. I feared losing myself. Closing down bars with diet soda, sleeping until noon, kissing virtual strangers because some boy made me feel bad about myself, wearing too much makeup and showing too much breast even for the stiletto-halter-mini mother of the year that I have always been. Yesterday, I woke up and thought "Oh, there were other things I was supposed to do in my time off".

In my time off.

Something terribly strange happened to me this week, something I didn't like. I have always had great respect for motherhood as hard work, my primary career, responsibility, life's calling. But never, never, have I seen it as a job. I forgot for a moment in there something crucial, something I've never forgotten before: Being my daughters mother is not what I do... being my daughters mother is who I am. It's what I was put on this earth to be. It's all I ever wanted, and I never knew crawling in and out of so many beds that it was only because that's what it would take a commitment-phobe like myself to have her head where it's always belonged, on the pillow next to mine.

And tonight, her first night home, I tucked her in and she held me close and said in half sleep to me that "I missed you so much... I'm really glad to be back home. It smells like our house here, mommy. It's different to be somewhere that doesn't smell like you. Here, hold on to me tighter like this so we're really close again at home ". And she held on until she fell asleep with one other whisper to me, the one I needed more than I knew.

"Can you crawl in my ear when I go to sleep, like get really small? Because then you can always be in my brain since I think about you all the time anyway. You can have a house there, and it can smell like you when I'm not home, and so it can smell like me for you too when I'm gone".

They were the babbles of an exhausted kindergartner up past bedtime, I know that, but that little tired 6 year old is smarter than I will ever be. She could never forget for a moment what I did for that split second here and there when she was gone... that there's no telling who really belongs to who anymore, where one of us starts and the other one begins. So I smelled her hair and listened to her snore for a bit, and kissed her forehead for the first time in 8 days.

And she smelled like her, and she smelled like home. And I'm madly in love with that little girl, the me I wish I could be and a million times more, the very picture of perfection, brilliance and living poetry.

And in this very second it dawned on me... summer break is really going to be a fucking bitch.