The Witching Years

You know how it is when you read a piece that so resonates within? That's how I felt the first time I visited and read Amy's fabulous words at The Never-True Tales. She's a talented writer and an on-line community builder. She writes, "Blogging is many things to many people, but for me, it's about writing. It's about the meditation between the mind and the fingers on the keyboard, the puring of thought and feeling in a way that becomes organic and good." Is it any wonder that I so enjoy this new-found connection?

Then I learned about Amy's awesome creation, Won't You Be My Neighbor--which she hosts so writers can connect and discover each other's incredible words. And this community is so important to me...a virtual life-line. Today I have the honor of hosting Amy as my neighbor. (And as luck would have it, I'm guest posting as her neighbor today, too.) After you've read her fabulous words below, won't you go visit Amy? Maybe you can slip off your suit coat, pull on a wool cardigan and climb into your slippers first....

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The Witching Years, by Amy of The Never-True Tales.

It’s staying light a bit longer each day, but we still have a long way to go until spring. I can tell because I still have to switch my car headlights on driving the kids home from the karate studio or the soccer fields, still have to flip the porch light before calling them in from the neighborhood streets. In another lifetime (which wasn’t too long ago), I’d sit out these winter evenings indoors, the kids too young for unsupervised neighborhood roaming, my own motherhood too new to risk a public toddler meltdown or unscheduled nap after nightfall. From my kitchen window, I’d watch the sun disappear behind the city long before dinner was served, and something heavy and panicky would rise in my chest and sink in my belly as the outside darkness closed over me like a blanket, locking me into a fate of 5 pm until 7 pm with only my babies for company.

It would have been so easy to switch on Backyardigans and switch off myself, but most days, I resisted the lure of the TV. Instead, I’d play cars on the mat in the boys’ yellow-walled room, listening to thevrooom-vroooom vibrating against their lips, then to the bubbles blown in the bath, the run of the water from the faucet as they brushed their tiny, pearly teeth. I’d find Hidden Pictures, change diapers, press playdough between my hands. I’d pause to find blankies and binkies before scraping the dinner dishes and setting them on the sideboard to dry.

I was on my own most evenings back then, Charlie working late. Every weeknight. Every weekend. (I still can’t believe we ever got used to that, but we did.) As I waited for 7 pm, I’d finish the forgotten loads of laundry on the bed, each t-shirt and burp cloth and OshKosh overall cooled and wrinkled in the heap. I’d stare out the blackened windows and wonder how I’d make it another hour. Another twenty minutes. Another ten.

This was my Witching Hour, but what people forget to tell you is how the hours add up, strung together end-to-end, day-to-day to become Witching Years. They commence in those first black nights of nursing a newborn, and they roll on and on until all your children are old enough to take the bus to school. Or at least old enough to wish they could.

And some mothers are great at it–love it, even–but not me. I floundered. I immersed myself in my boys: their needs and their wants, their meals and their clothes and their toys. I waved the white flag and gave myself over to them completely, and this was how it had to be. On the surface, I even looked good at it. Underneath, I was drowning. (Needing. Wanting.) I spent my days sinking and my nights kicking my way back to the top, to where at least the waves slapped me in the face instead of swallowing me whole, arms stroking upward through the dark. I stopped writing. I stopped exercising. I stoppedthinking, truth be told. I think maybe, there wasn’t enough oxygen to my brain.

It’s clearer here, on the other side. In the light. With kids who brush their own teeth and do their own homework and get their own snacks. I know now that being a mom of young children, staying in the house day after day, parenting solo 80% of the time…well, it is what it is. (Oh, is it ever.) I know that I did my best.

I also know I’ll never get those years back, as much as they often make me shudder: those years that passed so slowly as to nearly grind backward. Those years so long I measured my children’s ages inmonths instead. And that’s a travesty, because I left a piece of myself there. Something raw, and unmeasured, and instinctively maternal. Something sacrificial.

It was that something in me that gave way, that moved to the rhythm of my children’s sleep cycles, to the sunrise and the twilight, to the stirring of the oatmeal and the snapping of the car seats and the hefting to the hip, to the breast, to the mouth to kiss the lips.

It was that something that laid down arms. Set aside dreams. And that something was…there’s no other word for it…bewitching.

Thank you, Amy for your beautiful words, so honestly and eloquently woven together. It's great having you as my neighbor, and guest, today.