The Mom Salon | November 2021

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Leonard, Jackie (editor) The Mom Salon | November 2021 The Mom Salon features the writings of Motherscope’s 2021 Contributors, appearing in rotation from Mar. 2021 through Feb. 2022: Kate Bailey, Eunice Brownlee, Kelsey Cichoski, Heather Cleaves, Laci Hoyt, Micah Klassen, Shanthy Milne, Alyssa Nutile, Holly Ruskin, Kaitlin Solimine, Colleen Tirtirian, Megan Vos, Melaina Williams

SUBMISSIONS We believe every mother has a compelling story — and we are challenging you to take ownership of your story, to speak your truth. Motherscope examines the corners of motherhood we don’t often talk about. Be specific, be personal, be real.

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In This Month’s Mom Salon: Laci Hoyt | Mothering Through Hard Times

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Micah Klassen | One Size Fits All

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Colleen Tirtirian | Unlimited Cupcakes

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Kaitlin Solimine | The Bluest Egg

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Mothering Through Hard Times

By Laci Hoyt Our van moves down the highway, my husband behind the wheel. In the passenger seat, I wipe tears from my cheek. We have just left our firstborn child at college for the first time.

This loss has been looming for the last year. All summer, I tried to cram in as much quality time with her as I could, hoping it was enough to make up for the past, knowing full well that it wasn’t.

And I was not prepared for the rumination this transition would cause, but here I am thinking back over pieces of the past.

2008 My five-year-old hop-skips down the driveway with her little brother and me following close behind. Her backpack flaps against her, too big for her body. Her excitement is palpable. Today is the first day of kindergarten.

My son and I are going to the drop-in daycare center after the bus leaves.

We’ve spent a lot of time there playing and making friends. Even though it provides me with the only daycare I can afford, I usually stay and play instead of leaving. But now that my daughter is in school, I begin to split my time between the kindergarten classroom and the drop-in center.

We have full lives. We go hiking on weekends. We hang out with friends and go to soccer practice, and every night we read together. I go on as many field trips as the school allows. We play outside and inside and upside-down. We dance in the living room, and in the evenings I make dinner from scratch.

Time passes. My son starts school, and I accept a paid job in the dropin center. I volunteer at the school on my days off. At home, I clean, I 1

discipline, I show up where I’m needed, and I finish what I start.

I don’t yet know how our lives will change in one year.

2011 I lie in my bed awake but immobilized. When I open my eyes, the room spins. Fireworks ignite inside my brain. Every sound is coming at me through a megaphone. Even with the bedroom door closed, I hear my children fighting as if they are standing above me. I put my pillow over my face, pinch it around my ears, begging through tears for the sweet protection of sleep.

Hours later, I reawaken. The throbbing has eased enough that I can open my eyes. The world is still spinning, but if I move carefully, I can manage to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the kids.

I ease myself onto the couch near them. They start eating and telling me about their fight. I listen as best I can, but I’m on a merry-go-round. I’m on tilt-a-whirl. I’m falling through the air.

There is a refrigerator sitting on my legs. The refrigerator is actually crushing my legs. It’s not a refrigerator; it’s an elephant. I’m either going to die underneath this elephant, or I am going to lose my legs. Please, let me lose my legs, I beg inside my mind.

As if through a haze, I hear a small blurry voice speak, the pitch of its words ending in a higher octave than the rest. Some functioning part of my brain recognizes this sound as a question. One of the children has asked me a question. Did they ask for something? About something? I don’t know. My concentration is like that of a goldfish. I ask the voice to repeat itself. I miss the words again.

Say it one more time, I plead.

The need to repeat themselves is something my kids hate.

“Why don’t you ever listen?!” one of them shouts at me, exasperated.

I don’t know how to explain this to them. I don’t know how to help them understand. They are only six and eight.

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2012 The walls are dingy white. The walls are khaki gray. The walls are always one muted shade of tan or another. The doctors are always men. They are always dismissive. They are always overconfident. They never have adequate answers.

The chiropractor says maybe I hunch my shoulders too much when I sew, so I stop sewing. He says maybe I should stop spending so much time on my computer, so I stop writing. He says maybe I should stop bending over to pick kids up at work, so I start sitting on the floor. He says maybe I need to detoxify my house so we get an air purifier. He says maybe I need to detoxify my body so I try removing sugars, gluten, processed food, alcohol. He adjusts my neck every time I see him, and I go home feeling worse than when I arrived.

My primary physician sends me to a neurologist. The neurologist sends me to an ENT. The ENT sends me back to neurology. The second neurologist refers me to the dizzy clinic. Then I see an MS specialist, and he refers me to an endocrinologist. My primary physician says I might have to live with whatever this is, but he sends me to rheumatology just to be sure. The rheumatologist refers me to an immunologist and a gastroenterologist.

They perform MRIs and CT scans and x-rays. I get a spinal tap, a nerve conduction survey, and an EKG. Every time I see a doctor, they ask for blood. Often they collect more than 10 vials of blood at a time. But every test by every specialist comes back as unremarkable.

I am the thinnest I’ve been since I was 14.

I have read the internet looking for answers. And I have more doctor’s appointments than my kids have playdates.

Days pass.

Months pass.

Years.

Now the children are nine and eleven. I’ve cancelled plans with their friends so many times their friends have stopped inviting them over. We take a trip to visit family, and the kids care for me on the plane rather than the other way around. I stop disciplining and following through on consequences. I stop requiring chores and setting limits on screen time.

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I engage with my kids less and less. The longer this goes on, the more things I let slide.

I learn how to prioritize what needs doing, and I stop doing everything else. Survival becomes my main focus.

I need a mobility aid to walk. I suspect this development is embarrassing to my children, but which is worse: your mother needing a mobility aid or having to help your mother walk without one? I begin to wonder if they’re relieved when I choose to miss an event.

My neurological symptoms are scary for all of us. I give up driving. I quit my job. I no longer dance in the living room. I have lost my independence.

I have given up everything I enjoy. I cannot concentrate, and I cannot remember things. Some days I stay in bed. We eat frozen foods, take-out foods, and fast foods most of which are baked, supplied, or warmed by my husband after he finishes 8-10 hours of work. He’s exhausted and my efforts to help feel futile. I hardly ever make dinner from scratch anymore.

The kids are now entering high school and I don’t remember how we got here. I can tell you about the order of health events in my life, but I don’t remember simple stories about my kids over the years. I struggle to even remember what they told me ten minutes ago.

I’ve never been to a PTO meeting. I don’t volunteer to run the concession stand. I don’t take the kids on adventures anymore. We don’t have their friends over. We’ve stopped throwing birthday parties. We’ve given up on taking family vacations. And I miss a lot of soccer games.

All I want is to be able to mother the way I intended. To volunteer at events and help raise money for the cause. To show up at parent-teacher night and not look like I’m drunk. I want to go to my kids’ sporting events and cheer. I want to invite my kids’ friends over and drive them anywhere they want to go. I want to take them on vacation, to amusement parks, and for hikes. I want to stop missing things and stop having to choose to care for myself instead of showing up for them.

But instead, I find other ways. We spend a summer painting pictures on discarded plywood with acrylic paint. We watch movies together. When I’m able, we play board games and video games. Sometimes, the kids come into my room, lay on the bed with me, and talk. They still don’t completely understand, but they’re more forgiving now.

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When I’m too sick to make dinner, I coach them from the couch on how to make the simple things. It’s not been easy learning to let them help. I have it in my head that a mother is supposed to do these things for her kids. And I feel like I missed them growing up.

2017 I can barely breathe. I think it must be anxiety, but my attempts to calm myself aren’t working. Walking from one room to another is abnormally exhausting. When night arrives, I discover I cannot lay down without losing the ability to breathe. I wake my husband at 2:00 a.m. with an overwhelming feeling that I am dying. He takes me to the emergency room, and I am hospitalized. My oxygenation levels are dangerously low.

My heart is surrounded by inflammation. The doctors run tests, and my specialist list grows. But because of this crisis, one of my doctors starts to understand the bigger picture. And then the best thing to happen to me in six years occurs. He gives me a partial diagnosis and a prescription.

And with time, this prescription helps me start rebuilding parts of my life.

2021 “You are a good mom,” my mother says to me while I tell her about dropping my kid off at college. She likes to affirm this for me, but I always cringe internally when she says it. A lump instantly forms in my throat. I do the best I can with my circumstances, but I don’t feel like a good mom.

And ultimately, I don’t want to keep measuring myself using the “good mom” narrative. There is too much pressure, shame, and guilt wrapped up in that ideal.

Instead, I want to see my mothering from a place of appreciation for all the delights and sufferings we’ve been through. A place where my mothering is neither good nor bad. It just is.

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LACI HOYT wants to live in a world where kindness is a priority and everyone owns at least one hand-knit sweater. She writes from her home in upstate NY about living with chronic illness, love and relationships, and any other thing she can’t get out of her head. Her writing has been published through The Kindred Voice. When she’s not writing, she can be found with knitting needles and yarn, hunched over the sewing machine, or creating unique dolls and bags for her Etsy shop. Every Sunday, you can find a new haiku published on her blog. Visit Laci at www.liviatree. blogspot.com.

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Engage with Laci’s Story: Reflect on a difficult time you had to mother through, a time that felt like you were living in survival mode. Note what you appreciate about how you navigated that time and grieve what you missed out on.

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One Size Fits All

By Micah Klassen “I love the trees, they’re so beautiful, I just want to hug them!” my eldest son exclaimed, his blue eyes sparkling with rapture beneath the red rim of his bicycle helmet. We were on our way home from the park and he was riding his little Strider bike a few paces behind me as I pushed his younger brother in the stroller. “You do?!” I laughed, turning for a moment to witness his delight. It was so contagious, I couldn’t help but buy into it too.

We stood, looking up into the green boughs of a spreading roadside tree, orbs of sunlight expanding and refracting through the leaves, dappling the sidewalk with honeyed shadows. Summer was nearing its end and I was clinging to the final days of blue sky and warmth like a child clings to a favourite soft toy, afraid to let go. But my son’s observance reminded me that instead of thinking ahead to the end of the season, I could choose to pause and drink in the beauty that was present in this moment, slow my thoughts down and just BE. Sometimes, a three year old’s perspective is the perspective I most need.

Moments like that one continue to imprint a deep sense of awe upon my heart – they remind me of the privilege it is to nurture a young and expanding mind; that there’s almost a mystery to it, a sense that when it comes to interactions and conversations with my son, I am both a teacher and student at the same time.

I often pray he never loses this simple wholeheartedness, that ability to bask in the beauty around him without reserve. He’s happiest outdoors, particularly when the sky is blue and the sun is shining. Observing ladybugs. Digging in the dirt with toy excavators. Riding his bike, letting the wind ripple through his wild hair. He is curious, observant and focused for a three year old. Mischievous. Cheeky. Deeply sincere, and of course, the instigator of some pretty challenging behaviour, at times.

He’s conversational and not at all shy to engage with adults and kids alike when his interest is piqued. He loves figuring out how machines and tools work, and will spend hours constructing unique vehicles with the small pile of Legos he currently shares with his little brother. He’s always loved

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building things (he built his first Duplo tower at eleven months) and I’m so curious to see where this passion will take him, whether it will develop into anything more. He’s like his dad, that way. Always inventing things.

According to our infrequent visits with the doctor, he is developing well in relation to his age, meeting the milestones he should – although he’s always been tall. And he was “late” to start speaking – that didn’t happen until after he turned two, but when it did, his use of language progressed faster than we could keep up. Yet in saying this, I also find it easy to disregard the whole milestone ideology because it seems to be a widely-accepted truth that every child is different and develops uniquely. Or at least, according to the conversations I’ve had, it is. I hear these sentiments expressed so often in conversation with other mothers when we’re discussing or sharing experiences. Talk will inevitably turn to the subject of development, and a question such as “so when did he start talking?” is asked. Stories are told and empathetic comparisons are made, but eventually the conversation will predictably conclude with a few deferential shrugs and mutual acknowledgements of “but every kid is different; they’ll talk when they’re ready to talk”. (Or walk, or crawl, or roll over, or start eating solids, or master hand-eye coordination etc. The lists continue on through every stage, relentlessly.) I’ve been the recipient of this kind of validation on more than one occasion, after sharing a story about my son being late to talk, or not getting the hang of potty training when I was hoping he would, or after casually mentioning something about my boys’ development to a sympathetic listener. Sometimes I’ve wondered, is this just the “polite” way of making each other feel better when we worry our kids aren’t progressing properly? (I’ve also said it plenty of times, too). Is it like a euphemism? Or do we – as a society – really, truly believe that every child is different and deserves to be treated as such? I think if the latter is true, the way our systems of culture and education are currently designed don’t feel reflective of this.

What feels real to me is that there seems to be a benchmark set by society, and it dominates a lot. From birth, we are constantly being categorised, labelled, sorted, defined and numbered. I think terms like “prodigy” (a person, especially a young one, endowed with exceptional qualities or abilities) and “over-achiever” exist for a reason. The implications of these words have given me cause for much thought and reflection, lately.

Especially as my oldest son approaches preschool age. They are words typically tied to ability – to accomplishments, to the things we do, to what someone can achieve. Very rarely are these words applied to the

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way a person thinks. And as our world is becoming more and more aware, mental health matters much more than we give it credit.

What if our exceptionality was due to the fact that we each have the capacity to perceive and process the world in a completely unique way?

What if it was how we thought, rather than what we did or how we performed, that really mattered? What if our systems of education didn’t emphasise a “one size fits all’ model of learning, but allowed space for young minds to explore, experiment and discover in ways they naturally initiate? What if we didn’t set ultimatums like “you need to pass this exam” or “dress like this” or “sit there and listen even though I know you don’t have the cognitive ability to do so”, just because it’s “how the program works”?

My eldest son is not yet emotionally mature or cognizant of social etiquette, or able to be left alone for too long with his younger brother – because he’s only three. And yet, because he’s three, he sees the world in a way that is different to me, a more simple way, a way that has brought me back to things that truly matter. He is constantly hungry to learn (kids start learning the moment they enter the world), aware of the beauty around him, and unashamed to say things like “I can do this” or “I’m so strong” or “I like your shoes” with complete authenticity. Because he’s three, he is himself – free of the layers of pretense, insecurity, imposter syndrome and ego that we adults often find ourselves bundled up in, fretting continuously over our appearance – never sure if we’re projecting the right image. We learn to dress in preparation for winter while still enduring the summer heat, whilst children simply shrug into the clothes they are handed and ask “can I go outside now?”

We are all being shaped in some way. By what we read, listen to, watch, learn; by those we surround ourselves with. My sons’ worldview is being shaped as we speak, by my husband and I and our family and friends, and this is something we take very seriously, whilst knowing we will probably make mistakes along the way too. Yet as much as we are here to guide our boys as they grow up and mature, I think they will do a fair amount of guiding us, too, as we all go forward together. This has already been proven in the short amount of time they’ve been in our world, and I hope I will continue to remain receptive to such learning as the years progress.

My hope is that, as our boys enter into systems and structures that will no doubt shape them, groom them, and mold them in various ways, they

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will know just how much they have to contribute as well – regardless of their age. They will know they have the capacity to shape others, and that this is a sort of special power we all possess, not to be trifled with or taken lightly. The power to make a difference, to influence ways of thinking, to lead, not just to follow. To think for themselves, and to understand that this life we’ve been given was never meant to be a “one size fits all” textbook deal, but a grand and interesting choose-your-own-adventure story!

MICAH KLASSEN was raised in New Zealand and homeschooled by her mum, who was the first to spark a love for creative writing in her during primary school. That spark quickly morphed into flame — writing is such a cathartic expression for Micah and has helped her through some very difficult seasons. In 2010, she moved to Australia, fell in love and married her Canadian sweetheart — They now have two babies and Micah is doing her best not to fall off the wild rollercoaster ride that is Motherhood!

Currently writing from Vancouver, Canada.

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Engage with Micah’s Story: What do you admire about your child/children that has yet to be adversely affected by outside expectations and norms?

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Unlimited Cupcakes

By Colleen Tirtirian In the parenting world, there are few things that everyone can agree upon. I believe, however, that one of the universally accepted ideas about kids is that they are funny creatures. They do silly things, act ridiculously, and, most importantly, they say the most absurd things. Yet, for all the strange statements and unrelenting demands, there is an equal number of adorable moments. Whether it’s a cute moment or one that makes me cringe, I cannot help but smile when I think back on some of the statements I’ve made as a parent in response to my children.

Before I became a parent, I’d worked with toddlers frequently – from babysitting gigs to camp counselor, and even a teacher’s helper – I’ve always enjoyed being around this age group. I guess you could say I’ve been privy to the toddler mind and have a sort of understanding; they are in a world all their own and their imaginations are wild.

As a parent now, I love watching how my daughter creates scenarios between her dolls and makes up stories about them. My heart is full when I see my son running around the house, saying he is going to “save the day with his superpowers.” Each child truly believes in what they are doing. It is not pretend to them – it is real.

Since toddlers feel everything deeply, I’ve been keeping a running list of the things I never thought I would say as a parent. I do this mostly for myself as a way to remember the little moments that I would otherwise forget. I also do it because I want to show my kids, at a later date, some of the things they’ve said or done. It all boils down to memories.

Over the past year or so, I’ve found myself trying to talk my toddlers out of major meltdowns over some pretty small-fry things (not so adorable in the moment, but later on these become comical). In those moments, I am really attempting to help them come to terms with whatever it is that is bothering them. Still, I cannot help but laugh after we narrowly avert a full-blown toddler crisis.

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So, without further ado, here are some of the things I never thought I would say as a parent: “We don’t live in a world of unlimited cupcakes!”

We happen to live within a block of a damn delicious bakery. What started as a fun way to break up our long days morphed into a cupcake obsession.

And look, I get it . . . these cupcakes are straight-up sugar-coated crack, topped with beautiful buttercream and rainbow sprinkles. The dopamine rush of going inside that adorable little bakery with all its mini cupcakes in all the colors is hard to resist. I would love to eat nothing but cupcakes, but alas, this is not healthy. So I had to draw some boundaries around the sweet treats: We don’t live in a world where cupcakes fall from the sky, or where the streets are paved with sprinkles (much to my and my children’s dismay). It’s a sad fact, but cupcakes are not an unlimited resource.

“Take the garbage can off your head!”

Yeah. That one happened. I turned my back for one second after emptying the small bathroom garbage can into the larger kitchen garbage receptacle. “Mommy, I am a knight! Look! Look!” Somehow, a toddler can make a scene of horror sound adorable. “How can you see anything? It must be so stinky inside there! Take it off your head!” I genuinely smiled but simultaneously cringed. Needless to say, he needed a good scrub that evening.

“You can’t go outside naked.”

What I wanted to say: “Look, kid. I get it. This is how we were all born.

These birthday suits are a beautiful thing. We shouldn’t be ashamed and I am hella glad you are comfortable just the way you were made.

Unfortunately, society would disagree. You see, there are social constructs that I cannot explain succinctly, and, to keep it user-friendly, it boils down to rules. Just as you have rules at home, we, as humans, have rules to follow, too. It’s strange, but it works as long as people don’t get overly cranky over silly rules (which sometimes happens, but overall, the system works).”

“I am so sorry the Cheerios are not round enough and that I cannot make the rain stop!”

When it’s wrong, it’s wrong. And this was just one of those mornings where the Cheerios were the wrong shape, the bowl was the wrong color, 14

and the milk was too cold. The weather was too aggressive and I was supposed to make the sun appear.

Sometimes, there are just things that cannot be fixed. And while I do feel so sorry for the mishaps that I cannot fix, there are just some things that are beyond my control; a fact that I frequently need to be reminded of.

“I am also sorry for the rain, but no, I cannot make it stop. I don’t control the weather, although I am grateful that you think the world of me enough to believe I alone make the clouds move.”

“Underwear belongs on your butt, not your head.”

This was honestly the cutest thing ever. The underwear in question was clean, by the way. I think that is very important to note. My son put the undies atop his noggin and pulled the leg hole so that it framed his squishy little face. He then got on a bouncy seat and paraded around the house. He then asked me to hop on board his spaceship with his sister. I didn’t want to pass up this rare opportunity to explore space, so I agreed!

“Let’s go to outer space!”

For all the things I’ve said that stopped me in my own tracks, there are others that remind me of the sheer magic that is childhood. I love watching as my kids’ imaginations take hold and allow them to create worlds all their own. And I am beyond excited when they bestow me the honor of hopping aboard their pillow-spaceship and walking on the moon with them.

And when they are utterly adorable – which, they often can be – I really can’t help myself because, darn it, they earned those cupcakes. Maybe I should rethink the cupcake thing. Is there such a thing as too many cupcakes? Those funny little creatures that I call “my kids” sometimes need to believe in a world of unlimited cupcakes. If believing in a world of unlimited cupcakes is wrong, I don’t want to be right.

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COLLEEN TIRTIRIAN is a mother, writer, editor, and New Jersey native, currently writing from her home office in Hoboken. She believes that sharing the journey of motherhood, especially taboo topics, can help to normalize the difficult moments we all feel from time to time. When she’s not writing and juggling mom-duty, Colleen enjoys playing guitar and crafting (specifically, miniatures). Some may say she’s a bit quirky, but she chooses to embrace her eccentricities and channels them into her creative endeavors.

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Engage with Colleen’s Story: Make a list of some things you never thought you’d say as a parent. If you cannot remember them in the moment, spend a day or two taking note of what comes out of your mouth when interacting with your kids!

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The Bluest Egg

By Kaitlin Solimine Under a cherry tree I found a robin’s egg, broken, but not shattered.

I had been thinking of you, and was kneeling in the grass among fallen blossoms when I saw it: a blue scrap, a delicate toy, as light as confetti It’s the dead center of a very wet summer and I’m pregnant with our third child. We retreat from an urban pandemic, away from the Bay Area’s fog, to the humid marshlands of coastal New England where earthworms line the driveway waiting to desiccate and die, and the kids find a robin’s nest in the roof’s eaves.

A few weeks of watching, waiting: mother robin sitting patiently atop the messy nest. Our anthropomorphized view of her: stoic and consistent.

I feel kinship with her. This waiting. I remember the late egg days, how birth cracks you open, leaves fissures where once you were whole (torn labia, mastitis, pelvic floor dysfunction). Does she know her entire parenting life will be waiting? Waiting for them to fall asleep. Waiting for them to put on their shoes. Waiting for them to exit the school yard.

Waiting for them to fly. Fly away.

Her infinite patience scratches at me like a jealous itch. Do not waste this virtue, I think to tell her, but cannot speak bird words.

One day we wake on a sunny day to see the mother departed. In her stead, two tiny bird heads, still wet from their egg lives, are visible above the nest. We visit them daily, seeking their hungry, persistent beaks searching

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incessantly, opening and closing like empty claw cranes, begging to be fed. Where is she, mother bird? And what of the absent father?

These bald-eyed fledglings appear to exist only on the precipice of starvation. I look for the mother robin to confide in the endless cravings of small children.

The kids wonder when the baby birds will fly off, if they’ll be safe out in the wide, winged world. But just as unceremoniously, one morning they’re gone. The mother too. We see no evidence of newly-flown birds along the entrance path or the nearby rhododendrons browned from unseasonable rains.

A few days later, the nest has spilled an egg onto the ground, which miraculously proffers a bright blue eggshell, cracked at the top only slightly for one of those small, slick bird bodies to emerge. We collect the egg and place it on the dining room table where the kids poke it with greedy fingers and I constantly admonish them not to break its fragile shell.

It didn’t seem real, but nature will do such things from time to time.

I looked inside: it was glistening, hollow, a perfect shell except for the missing crown, which made it possible to look inside.

No, wait. That’s not right. I’ve rewritten this backwards, am unsure the verity of the egg’s provenance – did we find it in New England or the Philadelphia suburb near my in-laws’, weeks earlier?

A mother’s memory is viscous, slippery as albumen. This third pregnancy follows upon the heels of the others, eager to undo my brain, make me confuse their names, ages, habits . . . .

The eggshell we find is miraculously intact on the sidewalk beneath a maple tree, an invisible nest we cannot see when looking skyward.

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The patient mother – where are her eggs? And why only two birds? Didn’t she lay more?

That summer, our eldest collects an ugly assortment of natural wonders she keeps in pouches, pockets: weathered beach stones, a mangy gull feather, an acorn. I offer her the blue egg to add to her bounty; she refuses. I alone marvel at the blue – the bluest blue, as if nature indeed holds mysteries worthy of protecting, not unraveling.

Why blue?

I want to know: I read a scientific study that says male robins whose nests contain the brightest blue eggs feed their newly-hatched babies twice as much. Maybe the baby robins we meet are hungry because their eggs aren’t a brilliant enough blue.

A lifetime ago, I watched our maturing eggs on a flickering black and white screen, the infertility specialist pointing out which was readiest, when to harvest, to poke and prod – and yet this, the third, was unsuspected and unpoked. Would it be the bluest?

The mother robin never returns. Her fledglings depart to the thick birch forest behind the house where one night we heard an owl, where one winter we saw a fisher cat, her cruel, fanged grin. The abandoned nest lives on in the eaves, worthy only of a season.

I cup my hands around my belly, this tired, reusable uterus laying claim to just one more. I don’t know what happened to the blue egg, whether it was left on the table or the sidewalk; the summer wore on, the kids forgot, I packed our bags so we could fly away again.

Now I await the final crack, a splitting open I know too well. I return to the books with photographs of bald, slick heads emerging from the opening between spread legs and remember the pain – and promise – of splitting in two. Summer turns to autumn, the children start school and the house is empty: in the bedroom, clothes are scattered on the floor like fallen leaves; in the kitchen, a trail of toy cars leads from fridge to nowhere. To where did my fledglings fly?

Far away, the mother robin sits on a bare branch in winter woods, her puffed belly harboring eggs of the coolest blue.

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What had been there is gone now and lives in my heart where, periodically, it opens up its wings, tearing me apart. ## Italicized sections are quotes from “Poem 178: End of April,” by Phillis Levin

KAITLIN SOLIMINE is mother to Calliope and Rafael, author of awardwinning novel Empire of Glass, cofounder of Hippo Reads and Hippo Thinks, and a childbirth and lactation activist. Her writing has been featured in The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, National Geographic, Guernica Magazine, LitHub, and more. She lives in San Francisco where she is at work on a second novel, The Blue Lobster, which explores themes of midwifery, climate change, and New England Native American history, as well as a book of essays on home and motherhood.

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Engage with Kaitlin’s Story: Set aside some time to observe nature around your home: birds, insects, other wildlife, plants, the weather. Take note of what holds your attention the most. Then, write about it as a metaphor to you and/or your life.

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Continued Thoughts:

Every mother has a compelling story. What’s yours?

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