Lisa the Great

 When I was three years old, I remember standing at the side of my house thinking, “I am only three years old, yet look how smart I am.” This is a real remembrance. While my older brother was suffering from chronic asthma, with my parents paying way more attention to him than me, I, for a moment, understood how smart, how awesome I was. Most of the time, my parents spent their time and attention on my older brother. I was the healthy afterthought. Now, As a mother of five very different children, I have a modicum of sympathy for my parents in this time, especially for my mother. All mothers spend the majority of their time worrying about their weakest child. Often, what attention remains for the healthy second is lacking.

When I grew up, I left home, searching for the familiar, yet new. 

I could not find my own trueness, so I settled for a facsimile of what I understood. 

I felt my way in this new world, looking for what I recognized as true. 

Eventually, after a number of years, I found it in my children. In the five I gave birth to, I rose. I rose to meet and greet them from before they were born. If there were ever moments I knew myself, it was these. I was a mother. I am a mother. 

Yet, after they grew up, I was left with a gaping chasm. Who am I now? Who was I ever?

How can there be more than one true room inside a single person? There has to be. There is. I am still struggling with this room, with how I live within it, with how I reconcile this room with the past, with children, with the future. 

I am closer to the end than to the beginning, yet, when fitful sleep comes, I still dream as if I was a confused child, seeing my lost baby brother, or an obedient mother, mortaring all the gaps between my children’s loose bricks. A frightened aging adult, wandering a maze of rooms that promise salvation, but lead nowhere. The children, the parents, the lost brother return over and over, screaming of my inadequacy. In these dark nights, I believe this voice. When I wake, I summon enough courage to get dressed, walk the dogs, move on.

Is this a way to live one’s last chapter? Sometimes I pretend to be confident in my opinions, but it often comes off more like belligerence. Where is the balance? How do I find myself, the one who, at age three, I understood to be awesome, but who gradually slipped away? 

The awesome three-year-old is still awesome. She has inserted herself into the world for the good, and she has offered up five wonderful humans in the process. She has faltered and failed. She has persevered and proven herself. She is smart, strong, mighty. There is music and magic in her walk, her work, her will. I know this in my soul. Yet I find it hard to believe it in my daytime self. The midnight voice admonishes, and sits, like a lurking shadow during the day, waiting for night’s sleepless paranoia to clock in. 

I search for the confident three-year-old. She is still there, I hear her voice, and see her standing at the side of the house. Now I need her at the side of my bed. I am only 68 years old, yet look how smart I am!