When Safety Isn’t the First Song

*photo is an image of art by Margaret Bellafiore for Body Language exhibit

“Lady, how are you?” Rebecca asked.

“My daughter has her license,” I said.

I wanted to smile, cry, gasp, clutch my gut, and scream but just the words came out.

“She is driving…. by herself…. out in the world…”

“Oh honey,” she said, keeping her gaze locked with mine.

I didn’t need to explain how a happy and healthy and developmentally appropriate milestone fills me with terror.

“It’s not normal to wonder that my kids will be killed or die every day,” she said, “But I do. I’m working on that.”

I tried to be equally as steady and knowing with her not needing specifics to get the way fear sometimes takes up too much oxygen, skin, space, ideas, faith, trust, brain, heart, and life.

We’ve not all done safely in our sleep.

We’ve not all known safety as a certainty.

Safety isn’t the cloth we are all cut from even if it’s the one we wish to blanket our kids with.

We are trying to raise children who experience childhood without a background beat of fear, confusion, and crisis, who don’t expect disaster to visit and intrude.

How does one learn great self-care well with a self that wasn’t well-cared for as a baby, toddler, or kid?

Where does one learn the song of coo, the sway of the cradle, the rhythm of being murmured to through pain?

It’s not that we didn’t have women who loved us hard. We did. We do.

Not all know how it feels to be nurtured pre-verbally in our skin, bones, and souls by another human being devoted to our being to who’d had a being devoted to theirs. Not everyone even has enough bedding, food, or patience to spare or share. Don’t we all eat with the plates and spoons in our kitchen?

How does a mother pass down an heirloom never gifted to her? (part 2)