When I Finally Come Up For Air

When I finally come up for air,
I listen to my favorite podcast through a single earbud
as I push the stroller.
I allow caffeine back into my life.
I blow dry my hair.
I skip the morning pump session.
I stop waiting for slivers of freedom to present themselves,
and instead, purposefully carve them out.

When I finally come up for air,
I have metamorphosed into a new form of myself.

When I finally come up for air,
I don’t recognize the world. And strangely,
I can’t recall quite what it looked like before.
I can’t tell you what season it is,
only that time has continued in spite of my absence.
I don’t recognize pictures of myself,
either old or new.
I think my daughter looks more like me than I do.
I see a part of me that I’ve never recognized before in her face.

When I finally come up for air,
I poke my head cautiously into current events.
In all those tender months, I couldn’t
stand to think about the bad things.
There is suffering everywhere if you look closely enough.
Pregnancy requires a commitment
to faith in the world, trust in the future.
Every person I see was once somebody’s child.

When somebody asks me how it’s going,
I can’t honestly tell them.
Each moment is its own adventure, each day an accumulation
of a thousand different moods and reactions.
Things escalate from 0 to 100 in a moment,
and they calm down just as suddenly.

With two kids there’s always something that will break your heart.
Attempting to split myself in half leaves me with nothing.
When I finally come up for air,
I’ve stopped anticipating the return to my former self.
As the pieces of who I was continue to shed,
I’ve gradually given up on chasing them down.
The new skin I wear starts to feel more like home.

I have to accept that I will never take enough pictures.
I will never do everything right.
My kids will hold things against me
that I haven’t even thought of yet.
I am learning to allow them to grow up.

When I finally come up for air,
I take my newborn daughter to the park.
It’s early spring and the air is completely still.
I recline on a blanket next to her as she sleeps.
The sun warms my face and for the first time in recent memory,
I feel completely relaxed.
When she wakes up, I hold her to my chest.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” I tell her. “Thank you for choosing me.”

When I finally come up for air,
it all comes back to me in a series of snapshots.
The morning sickness, the ultrasounds, the hospital beds.
Each exhale takes me further away from those moments.
But this time around, when I come up for air,
I am no longer mourning what I don’t have.
Because I know what’s ahead is even better
than what I’ve passed through.
The tiny flutters will be replaced with tiny smiles,
the thumping heartbeat
replaced with first steps and first words.

By: Maria Lockard

Maria Lockard is a mother and freelance writer whose areas of focus include parenting, pop culture, and daily life in the United States. She studied English and creative writing at Virginia Commonwealth University.