Mother who…
…you sleep with your eyes closed, you wake up at 5 in the morning but you don't know if you ever got to sleep. You take on the world when you manage to get five hours of sleep in a row and you wake up startled, almost guilty that you might have forgotten to be a mother. You battle busy mornings, running through hallways to hunt for heads in t-shirts and dresses, giving directives from afar as if you were on the Wall Street stock exchange buying and selling stocks, struggling with unchangeable diapers, children who undress after wearing dresses, shoes that never find their pair, walking toward what should be a healthy breakfast, of course! Hunting mouths while diverting attention so you can fill them, you sing melodies, you grapple with liquids, jams, butters, and cookies that disappear into the bottom of bowls while you eat breakfast. Breakfast? What is breakfast? Maybe, by a miracle, a cold coffee just before closing the door before opening it again to grab that something you know someone forgot. With backpacks packed, snacks, gowns, bibs, and seasonal supplies, pacifiers, dinosaurs, and doll carriages attached to your children's hands, right in front of the door, just at the moment when it seemed like it was going to work that day.
Mother who…
…you give away every minute of your time and your mind when one of the litter is inSick, you make their suffering your own, you know how to guess it just by smelling it, you receive all the blows because only you know how to get up from them all, stronger if possible, seeing your loved ones fight with their emotions, impulses and sensations always between sleep, hunger and despair.
Mother who…
…you reason the unreasonable, cure the incurable, and achieve the impossible while tirelessly repeating the same advice, verbally imprinting it on the minds and actions of your little ones. Mothers observed in parks crowded with mothers trying, from the closest distance, to be insatiable critics of their own reality, spaces for exchange that, instead of encouraging mothers to rest, give rise to psychoparks offering intensive courses on what to do and what not to do to be “good and bad mothers.” Mothers running around saving children who seem to be emerging from under rocks.
Mother who…
…you try to do “normal” things when normality is the struggle between the conviction that you recover something but lose something else, almost guilty for having five minutes of time, nervously feeling for the mobile phone that is working and always at hand like a lifeline for the mother that you try to drown between smiles and strange monothematic conversations about what we long for near in the distance or awkward silences because you forgot that it is a two-way conversation without wipes in hand ready to clean the nose and face of your interlocutor.
Mother who…
…getting to everything, you live in constant hyperactivity, thinking about where the instruction book is for everything that is coming and is yet to come, balancing your ways, yours and those of the beyond, searching at times for emotional balance and patience that seems to have run out just before the alarm clock goes off, bent over on your knees, heads, pillowless and uncovered, wondering if you've rested enough.
Mother who…
...rocking the empty stroller at the traffic light, you search for the express keys to being a good mother by reading the latest blog, self-correcting and being your harshest critic, telling yourself that next time you'll do better, fighting with feelings of frustration and imperfection.
Mother who…
…you work at the highest intensity, constantly striving and with the sweetest sensitivity full-time and all year round. You create kisses and hugs, motivation, and excitement as you see your children become what you dreamed of, as they grasp happiness from your hand. Make the time with them count. Enjoy it, slow down, breathe, and let your catchphrase stop being “hurry up.” Put aside your cleaning, taxi driver, cook, nutritionist, nurse, educator, psychologist, mediator, decorator, storyteller, artist role… and be a mother because life… doesn’t come with an instruction manual; it comes with a Supermom.
Mother who… always was and always will be my Supermother.
Cristina Oroz Bajo