Floating

Take up more space

A Woman with Black Glove (2020) by GaHee Park

“We had an attempted break-in a few months ago,” a neighbor tells me as we pass each other on the street. She’s walking her huge dog and decides to muzzle him after telling me this. The kids and I are making our way back to the neighborhood from Starbucks. 

“Oh really?” I say. I’m on a sanity walk with my kids in the double-wide stroller. They have their cake pops and I have my cappuccino. They aren’t making a peep on our way back home, which gives me hope they’ll go down for a nap once we get there. I hadn’t seen my neighbor all summer and I was looking forward to having our 5 minute neighborly catch up. Until she decided to tell me this, of course. 

“Bad guys, Mommy?” My son says. My eyes signal to him to shush, as I am completely subdued by fear as she goes on to elaborate.

“If it wasn’t for Kivo,” her eyes signal to the dog, “who knows what would’ve happened.”

***

I’m mad when my husband leaves, and I'm mad when he stays. I’m mad when my kids sleep in, or when they dont sleep at all. I’m mad when they eat too much and when they don’t eat at all. Sometimes I wonder why I’m so mad, why I fantasize about fleeing, why I feel like I can't stay put. I don’t mind when my kids flee towards the sidewalk as I attempt to put them in their car seats. I get it! I want to do the same! In my head I think; I have to go! I have to go out and do something silly and frivolous for myself or else I'm going to lose it!

Yet I’m sedentary in these feelings of madness, I hold still and let the madness pulse through me like there’s fire in my blood. My lungs feel heavy so I channel some breathwork. I stay. Instead of fleeing I float. Sometimes I feel myself ascending upwards into the sky, floating higher and higher till the sky turns black. 

On my way up I notice the clouds are puffy and seemingly heavy with weight. But somehow they still float. From time to time they’ll casually drift with the force of the wind. They sit, relentlessly still, unbothered by the people down below. People live and then they die, with almost nothing to gain from in the in-between. But the clouds don’t care. They are avoidant, fluffy marshmallows that are surely always around regardless what the people below them are doing. 

Floating in space, alone, the moon seemingly right next to me, I barely glimpse at this huge beyond. This beyond reminds me of giving birth, the first handful of seconds of motherhood. Like, there’s this new opportunity to learn and to step into my power and to witness this brand new abyss full of colorful meteor showers and unpredictability.

Up here is where I can create. In my loneliness, in my madness, in my savage awkward space warrior princess ways. 

Up in space I read all my important books: a book about mad mothers, a book about grieving mothers, a book about the predisposition of a gendered society. I wonder who I will choose to be today. How soft or hard I want to portray myself. Just now, as I’m up in space, drifting somewhere in the sky, feeling hot from the bright stars, my mom calls me:

**phone vibrates constantly**

Unfortunately, I’m confronted with reality and I have to suspend myself back down to Earth and close all of my books. Unfortunately, I have to follow the trajectory of normal people, and remind myself of my script:

I feel responsible for letting her know that I’m fine, and that the kids are fine. I may/may not be fine and the kids may or may not have their back-to-school colds kicking in. I quickly practice in my head; I’m good, the boys are good, life is great! I’m savoring it all, everything is blissful!

***

I'm never more present than when my son is in swim class and I watch him from the pews. He laughs and cries with his instructor all at once. There’s a glass wall surrounding the pool so I’m on the other side trying to make out the muffled sounds. I think he tells his instructor that he prefers shark toys over dolphin toys, because his instructor will laugh and then proceed with “Okay, next time I’ll have some sharks for you.” When my son reaches the end of his lap his eyes look for me. When we lock eyes his mouth says “Look at me mommy!” I let out the widest, corniest smile, more sure of myself than I’ve ever felt.

***

Becoming a mom makes you an expert of sounds. Living in the suburbs, where things are softer and slower than the city, I had to retrain my ears for the subtler things. I recognize the sounds of the rabbits snuggling in the bushes, I know when the UPS driver is approaching our door because his scanner never works and he always smacks his lips when that happens. I know when my husband is putting on his loafers bc I hear a stomping from the kitchen ceiling. We have big fat squirrels that I confuse for cats sometimes but I recognize the way they swoosh through the trees until they finally pounce on one to climb it. 

I’ve become an expert of sounds because I want to be able to recognize an unfamiliar sound. I'm confident that I will be the first one to spot something suspicious because of my expertise. I’m always uncertain and I think it’s the uncertainty we all live with; when our tender, innocent, tiny lives will be taken away.

***

My son coughed all night last night and when he ultimately started to whimper my husband nudged me and I propel my limbs out of bed like a windmill to go tend to him. I apply more Vix and prop him up. I place my palm on his forehead to gauge his warmth. I cup his cheeks to get a better look at him. His face is droopy and tired and at that moment I accept that neither of us will be getting much sleep tonight.

This is where our power lies, to love something so tirelessly. I deny that women are predisposed to a life of suffering, that my son was born through a long night of labor and pain. That’s just what the culture wants us to think to bring us down to Earth. My body is a healer. My body floats and creates things of all kinds. I don't know what it is about me, but my kids need me, and I think that scares the shit out of people. 

***

“Who are you? What are you doing here?” Asks an alien driving past me in their aluminum saucer as I’m floating through space with my books. They seem flustered by my presence, like sneaking into space and floating amongst the stars is something to be bothered by. Like I’m invading their space in SPACE. Can you imagine? Floating in space is for everyone, species of all kinds, there’s no need to be so selfish! There’s room for everyone in the black abyss okay?

My problem is I have to take everything in the figurative sense. So I dwell and ruminate on this random question from this random alien. They literally only asked who I am as it pertains to being in their space in space. I don’t have to turn everything into an existential forum. But really, who am I?

The answer isn’t always so obvious. I’ve spent time thinking about the woman I am and the different women I want to become. Where do all these different women live and how can I find them? Maybe these women are loud and take up space. Maybe these women know secrets about me that I don't even know about myself. Maybe these women can breach code and tell me how to live meaningfully as a mother and wife. Maybe these women don’t care about labels in the first place. Maybe these women are trapped inside me, maybe these are the kinds of women I hold up with me in space.

***

The best part of my summer was jumping into the ocean with my best friend. We got a jumpstart from the pier. We counted to three and jumped straight upwards to smack into the ocean like pencils. The current was tough so we immediately came back to the pier to hold onto the ladder, where we stayed to float in the water and kick our legs a bit. She tells me about her fantasies, she has no kids and to my confusion, she says she still wants to flee. Maybe that's the predisposition of women: the urge to flee but the confidence to stay. It’s hard to talk about what I do up in space. I don’t get a chance to tell her about my fantasies, there’s too many underlined sentences and chicken scratch in my notebook that may make no sense. There’s too many thoughts floating around in this abyss and I’ve still yet to master how to pin them down. 

***

The strangest part about being a mom is that I don’t even mind that my kids took away my identity. I used to mind a lot, but now I don’t mind so much at all. I read something online once that said children murder art. I scoffed at this and dismissed it as the typical ignorance we see on any usual day. It’s an example of how, generally, people view mothers with a large dose of pity. I’m glad my kids took away the old me and made me a new me. The new me is pretty solid: I can create life and death, I cry at the full moon just like my grandmother does, I can write a lot of words down on a blank page, and I can even yell at my insurance company for not providing coverage for my son's inhaler. I was never able to do these things before. Said differently, I wouldn’t be a savage awkward space warrior princess if it weren’t for my kids.

***

I’m glad my mother calls me as much as she does. She has a boyfriend now and in general, her attention is now a bit dispersed. When she calls me I think, Finally, someone to mother me while I mother my children. When she calls me I think, Let’s be still for a minute. I want to talk to her endlessly about everything, but in the end I settle with, I’m fine. She knows what it means anyways. There’s a stillness in our silence, a quiet nod of understanding. She knows I’m fine could mean that all the women trapped inside me are fighting through skin to break free, to descend back down to Earth as one powerful union of bad bitchery. 

***

What's the difference between living and imagining? How much fantasy is too much? What’s your definition of love?

***

The reality is that I read too much and think too much and am chronically online. My dad always used to say “no piensas tanto.” I used to get so mad at that, but now I understand what he meant by this. A woman who thinks does a man no good. Thinking invades a man’s sense of safety and forces them to question their worth. A woman who thinks too much ends up creating too much beautiful art and prose. A woman who relishes in her self expression is a service that most people don’t know how to appreciate. 

***

We get home from our sanity walk and my son continues to inquire:

“Mommy, are they bad guys like The Incredibles?”

“No babe, there are no bad guys here, that’s only in the movies.”

I imagine this is the answer he wants to hear. I want my kids to view the world with goodness for as long as possible, so I continue to assure him that bad guys don’t like our house and won’t ever come over.

As soon as the kids are asleep I tell my husband about my run-in with the neighbor. I express the story with urgency. I give him every little detail, and try to describe all of her mannerisms from the way she recounted her story. I convey this with a tone of worry. Our tiny, tender world is at risk and I want to make that clear:

“How can we keep ourselves more safe?”

“We can’t. We can only do what we can. This happens a lot more than we think.”

At this moment I want my husband to hug me and breathe into my neck but he doesn’t because he doesn’t know it’s what I want and I don’t know how to ask for what I want. I wonder if he knows how fragile our tiny, tender world is. I think he may. But I think men don’t consider the importance of something until it’s gone, and maybe he sees me as another woman who’s doing too much thinking.

***

Focus!!! I tell myself. I’ve made my descent from space and I’m back at my desk watching my phone vibrate. I pick it up. There’s a few seconds of stillness. 

“Hi mom, how are you?”

“I’m good, how is everything over there?”

“Everything’s great here. Boys are at school, I'm catching up on some reading.”

“I miss them and miss you so much.”

“I miss you too, mommy”

***

Pay witness to me and my strength.

***

Let me hold my kids all night long. Let them stay safe right here in my arms. 

***

Let me take up more space. 

***

I’m fine.