Softening

Motherhood has made me soft. Even small, my stomach is still pliable. Where it was once taut and ready to repel, now it gives. Sometimes, when I’m lying in bed, I’ll slip my hand just inside my waistband to rest in the spot that used to be my baby. I hate seeing the curvature that remains, but it’s something entirely different to feel it. I accidentally reinvent the term doughy in my mind, except I mean it tenderly. You know how dough rises to be round and taut, and then you punch it back down to a deflated, dimpled pile? Doughy like that. But it’s okay, who doesn’t love bread?

Motherhood has made me soft. I cry at the news constantly. Even the most dispassionate headlines hit me like a heavy-handedly scored tearjerker. I cry indiscriminately. It doesn’t matter if the dead babies are Palestinian or Israeli. Or the families being ripped apart on the street by masked men are citizens or permanent residents or undocumented immigrants. I cry for the grown men plucked out of their lives like they don’t matter and shipped off to a nightmare prison for the unsubtle purpose of being stripped of their humanity. Each one of them has a mother, I think, who painstakingly made a person. Not a prototype or a prop but the center of her world once. It’s what we all deserve.

Motherhood has made me soft. Not just in the obvious spots. The skin that stretched to accommodate a bump in the front is left looser in the back. It took me longer to notice this change. The way it would ripple if I bent a certain way, so I bent a certain way and sent searching hands to make sense of the folds that form in the valley of my waist. The fleshy pleats are sumptuous in a way that reminds me of the heavy velvet curtains that hang in my son’s room. The ones he’s endlessly eager to grab fistfuls of, yanking them back and forth in a game of peekaboo with the world outside his window. He gets bigger every day and so he can’t know his own strength when he grabs his soft mama like that, too.

Motherhood has made me soft. So much so that I can’t bear to give you specific atrocities. Motherhood has also made me weak. I scroll fast when I see them, the twig-thin toddler limbs of Gaza, the shaved heads of broken men, the video footage that starts with the heavily armed masked agents approaching a car, perhaps. Even when there is no picture, no video, my mind supplies it. The sound of babies crying in hunger, confusion, pain, panic upon realizing they’re alone is all to easy to conjure. It makes my stomach feel like it’s stuck in a state of free fall to imagine the cries with no one to coo softly it’ll be okay, baby. Or if they do, it’s a lie.

Certain stories come back to me unbidden at night, tragedies even within the context of tragedies. The ones that will ruin my life just to know about because that’s how it should be. It should ruin your life to know the world is full of such cruelty. I wake up to check the monitor, half certain he’ll have stopped breathing because that’s only fair, right? I silently beg to be the most special mother who never has to grieve. I try to make it make sense. I need there to be a reason why my baby will not suffer like the other babies who did no more to deserve it. It’s because I love him so much, right? It has to be.

This is my great secret shame, that sometimes I cannot even consume the suffering from a safe distance. That I opt into privilege and luxury and ignorance because my softness feels pummeled into a pulp, porous and absorbent, by even a passive consumption of the global horrors. Before my baby I think I was more righteous. Now I long to be just be happy. Let the exhaustion be purely physical, please. There is so much right here, in my arms, to care about. Here, let’s try this: we’ll each pick one person to protect, vigilantly, forever. I pick my son.

(The plan made sense in my head to keep us all safe. If I wasn’t so tired from checking the monitor all night I could figure out where it went wrong.)

When my son reaches for me with his whole body — leaning, lunging, arms outstretched, mouth open — I think maybe nothing else even matters. Maybe I could just be stupid and satisfied. Soft-brained mama.

Motherhood has made me soft, and selfish. I see my son in every story, who he could have been, the world he will inherit. It’s impossible to not do this, I think. I feel more now because I am constantly practicing feeling on behalf of another human. And holy shit there are so many humans. Now I can’t seem to turn it off. I’m not sure if I would have honed this skill on my own. But then I had a baby. And now the suffering hurts more, the cruelty confounds more. This is not magnanimous nor sophisticated, it’s just some primal updating of my operating system. Sacrifice an ability to function in the face of bad news for strategic softness so I never forget even for a second: People are precious.

I read the news all day, adding more horrors like pins to the cushion that is my psyche. And then, when my son fusses from his stroller on our walk home from daycare, I cave quickly. He’s almost a year old now — the ache in my arms can attest to that growth. Not a day goes by that I don’t pick him up. I know this isn’t true, but I imagine my muscles are growing alongside him in symbiosis. In this way, I will always be able to carry him. Despite my softness, I must be getting stronger from holding him.