My son loves to cross-dress, a hobby which I wholeheartedly support. But a long evening spent frolicking in a leotard of purple, pink and blue flowers (worn backward for good measure) with a houseful of company led to a morning of stomping, door-slamming and shrieking in frustration at every request to the point that by noon the only alternatives left were his unceremonious ejection from the household or a nap.
He chose a nap, which is good as I’m unsure about the legality of setting lose a four-year-old upon the world at large, and because unsupervised naps turn into trampolining session I laid down with him. Put your head on my shoulder I suggested; he took a moment to consider the offer, which was to be expected as not five minutes before I’d been scarlet-faced yelling at him over one particularly well-slammed door. But he forgives me so easily time and time again, and within moments my palm rubbing across his shoulderblades and fingers massaging a blond hairline made his breathing steady, then slow, then sleep.
The slamming and stomping left me too keyed-up to follow; feeling him for once so calm made me disinclined to wiggle away, and the quiet and his proximity allowed out thoughts that for the past seven months I’d successfully managed to shove down. On the day my middle child was placed into my arms I hoped not only to gain a child but also to relieve a burden from her mother, a young woman I’d met just four weeks before but already loved as if she were my own. She gave me that burden then immediately took up another; dispossessed of that one she continued on taking up and shrugging off again and again and now again and nothing anyone has done seems to make any difference at all.
It shouldn’t, but in my very worst moments all my efforts were, I think, for nothing. I have made no difference. The hours, the work, the shrieking, the slammed doors — it has done nothing to keep her uncontrollable family together, and we won’t even mention the children spread far and wide in the paternal line, too many count, too many to contain, too many to track.
It’s foolish to make a decision based on what you hope someone else will do. Does it make me a bad mother to question so persistently even now the placement of this child?
No. Just a foolish one.
