My name is Leah and I am a perpetual flight risk.
I cancel plans.
All the time.
I’ve always canceled plans more than I’m willing to admit, but these days it’s gotten way out of hand. If you ever make plans with me, I suggest you don’t look forward to it because at any moment I could bail. And by any moment I mean any moment before we are face to face and not a moment after. I’d like to shamelessly place the blame on my son, who is less than a year old.
As any new mom knows, the transition into motherhood is less like a transition and more like a blind leap. We have no idea where or how we’re going to land, if we’ll survive the landing, and if we do survive, what to do next? Since plans don’t fit very well into this lifestyle, I make them but, outside of a doctor’s appointment, they are always tentative. Baby understands this and does his part to make sure none of my plans happen. It’s one of those strange coincidences that has convinced me of some paranormal conspiracy Baby must be a part of to steal my sanity. And to make matters worse, no one believes this consistently happens to me, and I’m sure he gets a kick out of that too.
About a week ago, I made plans to visit a friend on a Saturday evening. True to form, Baby didn’t sleep at night and I was running on ragged hours of sleep and adrenaline. By 3am, going out started to seem like a bad idea, so later that afternoon I canceled.
“Boo,” my friend replied in a text. Emotional, drained, and delirious I read it and instantly took it to heart.
How can she get upset with me for canceling? I’m a mess!
I replied back “No, don’t boo me. I already feel bad about it.”
She replied with an even bigger “booooooooo!” which was admittedly funny. However, I was hurt because I was feeling worn down to a nub, terrible for having to always cancel plans, and guilty about all my shortcomings as a mom who needs a break and as a friend who’s too dang tired to hang anymore. I tried to brush it off, got Baby dressed, and we headed to the grocery store.
When we walked into the store I grabbed a shopping cart, realized it had no seat to stash Baby in and had to walk against foot traffic to trade the useless shopping cart for a new one. There I was, fumbling around shopping carts with one arm, Baby in tote with the other and people were huffing and puffing around me impatiently waiting for me to move down the line. Eventually a lady snatched the cart I was trying to put back out of my hand and embarrassed, I grabbed the updated one and rushed into the store.
My day was officially piling on.
I scanned the grocery list and realized I passed up the broccoli at the front end of the store seconds earlier. “Of course” I grumbled to myself. I returned to the produce section, grabbed the broccoli and got stuck trying to spin my cart around. As I three-point turned my way out of the jam, I was met with yet another impatient passerby, who huffed at my clumsy exit as I blocked her access to where she was trying to go.
At that point, sadness flooded over me and I cut my shopping trip short. In the parking lot in the car, I finally burst into tears. My heart ached at a reality I created months ago: now that I had a child, I was damaged goods. I am not valuable as an individual anymore. I am just a milk maid and a slave and the world is not nice to milk maid slaves. Why, I wondered, do we treat mothers like an afterthought? Why are we not gentle with them? Why are we precious and valuable when we’re pregnant, but invisible when we’re taking care of our young children?
Then I thought about the guy that slammed the door in my face as I hurried my stroller up to the door in the middle of a snowstorm. And about my friend who said she had been sick for a few days and that’s why she hasn’t called or visited me in months. And about my job that treated me like a leper when I requested to work from home and responded by avoiding me. And about how isolated I felt all the time because of all the people that disappeared when the newborn novelty wore off.
The tears ran down my face for about five minutes when suddenly I thought about one of my friends who woke up at 4am every morning so we could workout together. Angrily I thought, I canceled on her plenty of times! She never once made me feel bad about it. And she still got up every morning at 4am to try again the next day.
It was my mind’s attempt to continue the self pity narrative but it had the opposite effect. I softened when I thought about how sweet that was of her. I remember being more tired and more overwhelmed when Baby was a newborn and yet her kindness in that moment was but a sip of fresh air to breathe, the perfect amount to keep a new mom afloat. And here that kindness was months later, coming in like a full breeze.
I told myself that I was not going to sit in that car and remember all the people and events that let me down during my motherhood transition. I don’t want to remember my story that way. Instead I thought of moments when friends showed up with their familiar warm presence just to hang, reminding me that I was still valuable to them. And my cousins, who made me cry happy tears from episodes of rich laughter on near daily FaceTime chats. And my mother-in-law who became my friend and gave me the tender love of a mother when I needed it most. And Anon, who stood with unwavering love and devotion so that I didn’t crumble when I was weak. And of all the great things that happened in these first months of Baby’s life that truly made the transition special.
Yes, the mom game comes with a new set of rules (and some of them I resent). But what’s special about a journey so magnificent is how deeply impacted we are by the small moments around it. And those moments frame our experiences so that we see a different picture of the world. Sometimes, they are bleak and leave us bitter and resentful and other times it’s a rose colored glass that keeps us young and optimistic. Often, we have a little bit of both and ultimately it’s up to us to decorate our lives as we see fit even though we can’t control what we’re given and when.
However, we can control what we give and far too many times we underestimate the power of a kind act. How often we loosely pass along a huff, a puff, or an impatient eye roll yet flashing a genuine smile that moment you accidentally make eye contact with a stranger feels uncomfortably raw. If we could somehow consciously remember that one kind act can reverberate far out into the future, maybe we would find ourselves more inclined to gift our kindness with attention. If we spread love with the same purpose we spit our grief maybe, just maybe, one person at a time could change the world. If one act of kindness can bring a tired mother off the edge over and over again, our interactions with each other are more than a trivial occurrence and our legacies are made up of the way we make others feel. Life is about how we will be remembered long after we die and it’s truly the beauty in human connectedness.