It Won't Always Be Like This

By Sonya Spillmann
@sonyaspillmann

Shoes on, in a light jacket, I walked my daughter to school today. The birds—robins, cardinals, all the Mid-Atlantic chatterers—wished us a good morning and good day. The sky was blue, and wild violets dotted the yards we passed. It seems so small, so trivial, a banality of motherhood really, walking your child to school. But there was significance in her hand in mine, in these steps taken together. 

It’s just a short half mile, maybe less. We can walk it in ten minutes, twelve at a first grader’s pace. If my husband happens to joke it’s ‘take your horse to school’ day, we might go faster. Her imaginary horse, Stanley, will canter—but we often lose more time than we gain (for Stanley likes to munch the grass and tires easily and oft-requests my daughter dismount and walk). 

But today, just the two of us moseyed down the hill, crossed the street, and walked through the back school gate towards the building. At the door, my masked mouth kissed her masked cheek, “I love you, goodbye, have a good day!” Then I turned around with my heart beating in exclamation points -- I did it! -- to walk myself home. 

My first school drop off in a year. 

The first day I won’t be sitting at a table for the better part of six hours, keeping her on task during what has felt like an eternal year of virtual school. 

The first time I walked this distance since having major surgery seven weeks ago.    

***

Almost two months earlier, I stood in my bedroom and faced the mirror on my dresser. I wore a tank top and sweatpants, my hair up in a bun. With arms out wide, hands gripped the edge of the wood. I looked myself dead in the eye: big brown irises, jet black pupils, the deep of a well. I felt weird—we don’t look ourselves in the eyes much as grown women. We look at ourselves, yes. But we don’t often look in. I held my gaze. 

Alone in the bedroom, I sensed that I needed to tell myself something. To make sure my now-self and my then-self were on the same page. I’d been here before, in a position of strength and calm anticipating a big life change. In the moment, I wanted -- needed -- to speak truth over my body, through my eyes, and down into my heart. 

I’d be under anesthesia soon, in a surgery longer than a direct flight from the east coast to Europe. I’d need to stay in the hospital for two days, then come home for what could be up to two months of recovery -- maybe less, who knows, many women do great. And for the others who don’t do great, recovery is hard, painful, and prolonged. 

Into which category would I fall? Standing there looking in the mirror, I reminded myself about my previous major surgery last summer. How, yes, I was so fearful of the pain and unsure of the process. I remembered, and now could anticipate, there might also come a time during recovery when I’d fall into distress—feeling that this, this moment, this pain, this crisis will never end. The emotions will threaten to swallow me whole and I didn’t want to get lost in the now-ness. In believing that this (circumstance, emotion, phase) is my lot, my station forever. 

I’m sympathetic to the woman I’ll see here again in a few weeks—the one who will look like me but won’t feel like me. The one who wouldn’t believe me if I told her this then. I’m aware of how easily I could spiral down deep, so I tell the future me now what I will have already needed to hear then.

As if I were a mother talking to her daughter, I looked myself in my eyes, and spoke out loud. Clear, objective, and honest. 

“It won't always be like this.” 

***

She was the first, the tiniest. Six pounds, but dropping quickly. I was a new mom with no milk, in a body I’d trusted to birth my baby, by which I now felt betrayed. A labor that didn’t progress, breasts that didn’t fill, and tears that wouldn’t stop. 

My new baby was starving. 

Her nights were my days, and her days were at night. When she wasn’t asleep, she screamed, hungry and wanting. And when yet another diaper was dry, I cried in desperation. A week into first time motherhood, just as the milk began to fill and the diapers yellowed with weight, I asked a grandparent, “When will she learn?” The eating, the sleeping, all of the things I thought babies instinctively knew. Oh, she’ll figure it out, they said. No instructions, no advice, just a hand on my shoulder, right this way they might have said, this is a path meant only for you. 

“If I ever sleep for more than two hours at a time, I swear it’ll be a miracle,” I said to no one in particular. My life was a blur. All I knew was nursing and diapers and the smell of her fuzzy hair. Desperation and sleep deprivation numbed the transcendence of new motherhood. I lost myself in the belief that this time would last forever. 

***

Twenty-five years ago this month, my mom died. I was a senior in high school and while my parents didn’t speak of her impending death, I spent the month of May anticipating a devastation I could not name nor imagine. After she died, I lived the rest of the year eviscerated by grief. For some, the pain passes quietly, quickly, a shadow gone with the night. My grief was violent. A tearing, ripping, destructive force. I will never not be in so much pain. I believed this with all my heart. 

In the fall of that year, I’d drive home from my college classes and though it had been months since she died, I’d kick off my shoes and before I could think, yell,  “Mom—” out of habit when I first opened the door. 

I don’t remember the first day I didn’t cry. But I remember that night, realizing I’d made it through an entire day without trying to keep back my tears, my heart broke afresh. And then I cried over not-crying, over the possibility that what people said was true—that time might heal, that my pain would change. 

This was my first lesson, a baptism: It won't always be like this. 

***

The same violets that bloomed the spring my mom died bloom on our walk to school all these years later with my daughter. 

In every new phase and hardship, it’s been easy for me to get lost, gasp for air, believe this is it.  

When the baby didn’t sleep and neither did we. When the toddler dropped his nap and screamed every afternoon for an hour. After the move, the new baby, new schedule. The devastating news, the change of job, medication, and diet. It can all feel so unmanageable, too much. Too heavy. 

But it won’t always be like this.

In the past year through Covid and quarantine, on top of my diagnosis, the tests, the surgeries. Through virtual school and not seeing family and every hard thing that happened in our country, over and over and over I’ve repeated these words to myself out loud. Maybe the circumstance will resolve in a prescribed six to eight weeks. Maybe it will take a year, or two—or five. Maybe it takes decades. Or, like with grief, maybe it will take on different forms but stay for a lifetime. 

Yet even then, even if my hope for this truth lies in eternity, I take comfort. Because it won’t always be like this.