When I had my first child a friend sent me flowers with a card that read, “You know more than you think you do.”
I knew nothing. Those early days of motherhood felt like ninth-grade algebra all over again. I failed algebra. I didn’t know how to solve for X to determine the time Tammy would get to her grandma’s house if she was driving 53 mph; had 315 miles to travel; and needed to stop at a rest area three miles off the highway to buy strawberry-banana flavored Hubba Bubba chewing gum with the $1.50 she had in her pocket.
Nor did I have any idea how to compute how much sleep deprivation it takes to enter a state of psychosis where hallucinations appear of Tammy blowing giant pink bubbles big enough to make her car fly like in the movie Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. I just knew I was close to that level of sleep-deprived psychosis after only the first week of motherhood.
Days were a rotation of nursing, changing diapers, moving my son from the bouncy seat to the swing to the second bouncy seat, back into my arms where I jiggled and cooed and sang ridiculous songs of my making while I paced the house careful not to trip on the baby paraphernalia that multiplied like some other kind of advanced math which used exponentials and ellipses into infinity.
My children are grown now. I’m no longer on the carousel of routines, rules, homework schedules, extracurricular activities, adolescent moodiness, or teenage drama. Things are pretty quiet now, sometimes uncomfortably so. I miss the strangest things too– such as the orange clay at the threshold of the front door from their baseball cleats and the smell of their hair at the end of the school day. I can still picture my oldest son grinning amid the branches of the crape myrtle tree that he would climb every day after school, and I can hear my younger son’s laugh exploding like endless bubbles of carbonation.