Wrestling

Ever had the feeling of being impatient with a loved one, or maybe even arguing or saying something mean, only to regret it later--maybe days, but probably only minutes or seconds later--when either time or an event or a realization of your love for that person puts the situation in perspective? (My answer: Daily)

Enter: the peacefully sleeping child, sometime around 11 p.m. when the house is completely quiet and dark.

Is there anything sweeter, more likely to make your heart catch in your throat, more likely to pile on the guilt if you have been a less-than-perfect mother earlier in the evening?

If Matt is going to be late getting home and it's been a long day, I may urge Theo to bed a little early. He is actually great at going to bed, but the hours leading up to bedtime can still be the most volatile times for us. Then, it could be a few hours or even just a few minutes after he has been wrestled to bed when I sit on the couch, looking around, and I start to miss him again. I'm pretty sure that feeling will never go away, it will just manifest itself differently as he gets older.

Maybe you'll think this poem is weird, but I really liked it. Try to see beyond the creepiness of the metaphor.

Mary Karr's intro (from "Poet's Choice" in the Book World section of the Post . . . my favorite): "Whether a child recklessly runs into traffic or clings until peeled off, every mother must balance keeping said child safe while urging him or her to self-reliance. The mother in Sarah Harwell's 'Dead' recounts one of the small miseries of parenting: nightly wrestling a wakeful child toward sleep, which--in mythological terms--is within the kingdom of Hades. . . . The mother's relief at the child's departure ultimately prompts self-indictment for ordering the girl into Hell. Without such boundless rivers of guilt, maternal love would be cheap stuff. Hardly worth celebrating."

Dead
by Sarah Harwell

The way my daughter sleeps it's as if she's talking
to the dead. Now she is one. I watch her eyes roll
backwards in her head, her senses fold

one by one, and then her breathing quiets to a beat.
Every night she fights this silent way of being
with all the whining ammunition she has.

She wins a tired story, a smothered song, the small
and willful links to life that carry her away.
Welcome to the Egyptian burial. She's gone to Hades

with her stuffed animals. When she wakes,
the sad circles disappeared, she blinks
before she knows me. I have listened

to one million breaths of her. And every night
my body seizes when she leaves to go
where I am not, and yet every night I urge her, go.