Movements in Motherhood
By Elizabeth Berget
@elizabeth_a_berget
He was already five minutes late.
I kept looking out our front window, willing the lights of our red Ford Explorer to come bouncing down the street and into the parking spot in front of our house, but the street remained empty and dark. I turned away from the window as my daughter yelled from the dinner table, “Mom! I spilled my milk!” and that’s when I heard my phone ring from the kitchen.
It was my husband.
He was stuck in terrible traffic because of a big accident on the highway. He hadn’t moved in the last ten minutes.
I looked at the time, and my eyes nearly bounced out of my head.
It was swimming lessons night, and we had worked the timing of this night down to a science. My husband manned the kids’ dinner while I gathered all the swim gear. Then I would take the two oldest to lessons and get to swim laps myself while my husband and the toddler got some quality time at home together over Duplos and graham crackers.
For one evening a week, I had the serenity of a one-piece, some goggles from Amazon, and earplugs waiting for me. For one hour, I got to block the world out and think—one luxurious thought at a time—all set to the rhythm of my deep inhales and exhales.
The system had worked perfectly so far, but when my SOS texts were met with his SORRY, my serenity went down the drain. All the calm I had been anticipating in those aqua blue waters had shifted to chaos because I now had T-minus seventeen minutes to single handedly get the kids to finish eating, put them in swimsuits, find towels, and also search for my youngest’s swim gear because I knew better than to try to keep a jealous toddler out of the pool for an hour. I wasn’t even sure I could find a swim diaper for him, but I hoped one was still floating around in the bottom of a bag from last summer because did I mention it was the dead of winter? Not only did I need to gather swim gear, but I’d have to locate and help my kids into their socks, pants, sweatshirts, boots, mittens, coats, and hats since the air temperature was hovering somewhere just above zero. I also needed to warm up the car, and then there would be all the car seats to buckle with half-frozen, un-mittened hands.
Knowing I wasn’t going to get my laps in at the pool, I started doing laps through my house—up to the second floor for swimsuits, all the way down to the basement to grab towels from the dryer, back to the dining room to not-so-gently remind everyone to just keep eating, then to the backdoor for boots, and finally to the front closet for winter gear. And of course, no one in the under-seven set can get a swimsuit on by themselves, so in between wrestling twisted swimsuit straps over my daughter’s arms and tying my sons’ swim trunks tighter, I ran out to start the car. I turned for the final lap of coats and mittens and boats, barking at my children to try to move faster than the snail’s pace they were at.
Eighteen-and-a-half minutes later, I was out of breath and sitting in the driver’s seat of our minivan. All of my children were buckled, and a giant bag of what I hoped was everything we’d need for the night sat next to me in the passenger seat. I could feel my heart racing—partly from the sprinting I’d just done through my house, and partly because shortness of breath is one of my body’s go-to ways of dealing with anxiety, right alongside a racing heart and jaws so tight they could crush metal. But before I’d even pulled into the street, my daughter was asking for music—kids’ music! —and then my son chimed in from the back: “Yeah! Let’s listen to John-Jacob-Jingleheimer-Schmidt!!!”
That was a hard no for me.
Over the whir of the heater at full blast, I told them that mama needed silence. I needed to use the eight-minute drive to swimming lessons to calm down, and more importantly, I needed no one to talk to me or ask me anything. I just needed eight minutes.
I should have clarified that I also did not want them to say anything at all, because the two of them, pictures of obedience, began to “whisper-sing” John-Jacob-Jingleheimer-Schmidt to each other. So I quickly turned on the radio and compromised with the classical music station, a station which I markedly remember mocking my own mother for listening to when I was a teenager. I thought, classical music has calming properties, right? Don’t they make albums of it for babies?
I thought wrong.
The second I found the station, what came out of the speakers was a composition that played like the love child of the theme from Jaws and Flight of the Bumblebee. It was fast and intense, all crashing symbols and angry violins. The song was part Wile E. Coyote chasing the Roadrunner and part baby bunny about to be eaten by a wolf on Planet Earth.
I pulled up to a red light and rested my head on the steering wheel. I was straddling the narrow fence rail between laughing and crying because this was a familiar song.
This was the frenzied cadence of three kids in four years. I’d heard these notes before, in the voice of my toddler at 5:45 a.m., calling from his crib, after I had been up with my newborn four times in the night. This established rhythm bounced off the walls of my house and echoed my children. I heard it in the moments when the baby was crying to be nursed, my toddler was crying to be held, and—just when I thought I couldn’t handle one more thing—my oldest began crying because he wanted the blue cup instead of the red cup. I’d danced to this movement before. I’d wiped butts with a baby strapped to my chest, and I’d twirled and spun—meeting need after need, questioning my ability to cope if even one more catastrophe erupted.
There, at the red light, the music of that particular day crescendoed.
I thought of myself as the conductor of this tiny, absurd orchestra of kazoos and Fisher Price xylophones, who were now dressed in swimsuits and mittens and strapped into their car seats behind me. So much of the time, I do not feel equipped to be leading this orchestra. I don’t even know how to play an instrument. My mom once tried to pay my older sister to teach me piano, but my sister and I fought so much that my mom literally pulled the plug on the keyboard after two weeks.
My musically talented friend Laura once taught our homeschool co-op about classical music. What I learned is that the conductor cannot ultimately control the music. My mini-musicians and I are at the mercy of the notes on the page. I don’t get to write the music. I can’t control whether the morning is filled with tantrums and sibling fights, or if my four-year-old unexpectedly falls asleep in my lap on a Thursday afternoon, his slow, gentle breaths on my neck.
But what the conductor can do is control the tempo.
I’ve turned plenty of Moonlight Sonata mornings into The Ride of the Valkyries because I often lose control of my response. I snap my conductor’s baton in two and storm off, heading directly backstage to the darkest corner of the pantry where the chocolate is kept. I have also learned to dig the superglue from the bottom of my diaper bag and repair the baton right alongside my relationship with the orchestra. I can walk back on stage, apologize, turn the page, and keep the music going.
As I approach my ninth year of motherhood, I’m trying more and more to lead the orchestra to play through even the theme from Jaws at a lullaby pace. I’m learning that in those moments when all is dissonance, I can choose to simply slow the tempo of those intense crescendos in the piece and gently guide us toward the resolution.
Back at the red light, I turned and told my kids I was sorry for the drill-sergeant tone I’d taken with them as we scrambled to get out the door. I told them that I shouldn’t have taken my stressful situation out on them like that.
The light turned green. I picked up my baton and started the music again.
Minutes later, we hopped over snowbanks in our haste to get inside and collectively rejoiced as the warm air of the pool room washed over us. I helped my children out of their winter gear and dropped my older two off with their teachers. Then I slid into the water with my toddler. He laughed as he splashed, dissolving the dissonance. He squealed as I whirled him in circles with round after round of Motorboat, Motorboat, and it sounded like resolution.
Guest essay written by Elizabeth Berget. Elizabeth is a wife, mama to three, homeschooler, photographer, and writer who has always done her best thinking while writing—from her angsty teenage journal entries until now. She’s lived in Africa and Asia but is really just a country mouse with a Minneapolis zip code. She strongly believes in the restorative power of Jesus and a home-cooked meal, or even just a really good cheese, and writes mostly about how the image of God is uniquely understood and displayed in motherhood. You can find more of her words previously on Coffee + Crumbs, at her website, or on Instagram.
Photo by Lottie Caiella.