Practicing Motherhood
Leilani Mueller
@leiraewrites
The Brazos River meandered its course just out of view of the playground swingset, but my little daughter and I knew it was there in the background of our morning, charting its course just as we did the same.
Spring in Texas included kind weather that ruffled our hair and belied the hot summers soon to come.The tall, old trees swayed in the breeze, and I lifted my little girl onto the swing. Her little hands wrapped themselves around the chains. I pushed her, but I also told her to practice.
“Make your legs straight, and then bend them.”
She tried, but it was difficult for her tiny legs to coordinate the movements.
“We’ll keep practicing,” I told her.
Those words, “keep practicing” have been my own companions throughout the years. Maybe I needed a little girl who needed to hear those words to remind me of the “practice” in my own life.
Years ago, seventeen second graders were put into my charge, and I, freshly returned from Senior year studies abroad, embraced the challenge. After all, my bicycle had routinely traversed the Oxford streets. Words had poured from my fingers onto the page in numerous essays. Names like Woolf, Austen, Eliot, and Tennyson were as familiar to me as BTS members are to their super fans. I’d finished my studies and traveled through Roman ruins and major airports. Exploring the world and studying at university had prepared me for everything second graders could put me through. So, I thought.
It was my first 9-5 job, and it sapped all my strength. My strength, that had allowed me to write papers into the wee hours of the morning, bike miles back to my residence while pummeled by rain, and zip away to Ireland while writing a thesis, was zapped into non-existence after just a few hours into class. When the kids were liberated to recess, I’d close the door and lay down flat on my back on the blue, red, and yellow ABC mat. I’d set the CD player to repeat and listen to the words of a melancholy ballad. I was exhausted. Who knew being an adult took so much energy?
I fumbled in that first year of teaching. I didn’t stand the way a teacher should stand or command with my voice in the way that a teacher should. It would be three years, four years, even five years before I realized something had changed in all the repeated motions of standing tall and speaking as if I expected obedience.
I drove to work, parked, and walked with firm steps up the stairs into the classroom. I didn’t stand at the doorway uncertain if the students would behave. I walked to my seat and called class to order. Eyes rested on me, and silence filled the room. Somewhere between the ABC mat, and this new classroom with its circle of chairs, I had stopped pretending to be a teacher, and had become one instead. Practice had turned me into a teacher; however, teaching wasn’t the only practice I had been engaged in accomplishing.
When newly married, my husband and I took up residence in a tiny, converted garage. We often took runs together in the evenings. For my athlete husband, this was an easy task habituated into his body by years of swimming and running. I, on the other hand, counted the steps to the next stoplight, with the hope that when we arrived at the crosswalk, the light would mercifully be red.
Years later, on different streets, I found myself running again. I pushed my body to move, zigzagging between small houses and fields of winter wheat. My muscles responded with acquiescence. I used to be convinced that the last three tenths of a mile were impossible to complete. On this run, three-tenths of a mile found me strong. My breath did not come in ragged staccato, but instead it flowed two breaths out and three breaths in.
Then one day we were out the garage together, newly married, and somehow we walked back through the front door with our first child. That small rosebud of a person took all my energy, not unlike those early years of teaching. The first time I stepped back out of the door of my house to walk to the gate, I shuffled like an old lady. Taking a shower provided cause for celebration. My body had never experienced tiredness of this sort. Those first days of motherhood found me on our couch more often than any other place.
So, I did what I had learned to do so many times before: I practiced the muscle of motherhood. I kissed my baby’s small, perfect cheeks. I bathed her in the sink. I buttoned onesies and cooed over her as I changed her diapers. One day, I was strong enough to strap her to me and walk to the park. We sat together in the swing, I held her small frame against me while I pumped my legs back and forth. I didn’t realize how short the time would be before I would put her on the swing in Texas and tell her to practice. The breeze ruffled my hair as we sat, swinging and growing together.
It took years for me to connect the dots that the body responds to new chapters of life in the same way the body responds to new exercise. Muscles become sore under the strain of a new regimen. Food cravings shift. Exhaustion comes. Then, as I persist, my body becomes stronger. I become stronger.
Sometimes I assume mothering should flow out of me without any effort. But, just because my body’s design includes the ability to birth babies does not mean that my body will immediately respond with strength to the new life held inside my arms. My body needs practice. My arms need to gain strength. With each new birth, I have had to relearn how to make space for a new child.
Mothering is like any other task. Keep on doing it, and it becomes easier. Patience expands. As my body becomes acquainted with the job, the possibility for strength appears—strength that expands to include each new little person.
Recently, my children and I went to the park by the river again. The older three amused themselves on the slides and bars, and I sat with the baby on the swing. Slowly, I pushed my feet against the ground and the swing moved upwards. I held my littlest daughter against me, and she smiled in delight as we went higher, enjoying the rhythm of the swing. The river flowed in the background, but unlike the river meandering its way within the same boundaries, we had grown. The other children made their way to the swingset.
My four-year-old son sat down on the swing next to us.
“Legs out and bend them,” I told him. “Straight. Bend. Practice.”
He tried, and the swing inched forward a little.
“Yes, buddy, that’s it!”
Next to him, his sister, now six, bent her legs in the same rhythm that I had once taught her. The little girl, brought home in a house that used to be a garage, swung on her own.
“Straight. Bend. Practice,” I’d told her too.
Just as my children practice, so do I. So will I always.
Guest essay written by Leilani Mueller. Leilani, a California native, and Texas transplant, spends her days with her four little ones, with a mix of teaching British literature online (she teaches highschool now), writing with friends, reading books, and enjoying time with her husband, a philosophy professor at Saint Constantine College.