It’s easy to do the Madonna-whore thing. I have a lot of sex, so I am a bad mother.
How do you have 1-3 orgasms a day without neglecting your child?
But really what you mean to ask is, How dare you?
Everything I do to process my pain and prioritise my pleasure, is grounded in making sure I show up whole. And my wholeness feeds into my ability to mother. I don’t fuck people who fuck with that dynamic.
Nagaramama. Naga = The snake, my spirit animal. Ra = King, my son. Mama = Mother.
The other day, he saw a plush snake in a gift shop, ran to it, cuddled it close, gave it kisses, and said, “This is Mama!”
He’s known me since before he was born. I’ve known him, wanted him, hungered to meet him since he was an egg nestled in one of my ovaries, my silent sidekick for my insane adventures.
He looks exactly like his dad, my great love - and please don’t let me get started on people saying I can’t possibly truly love my husband because I am a high-double-digit slut.
But even without his dad, he would have come into being anyway. There was no stopping him. I know.
He gets his defiance, his love for words, and innate talent for easy code-switching from me. There are no half-measures with this child. You are either utterly devoted or you don’t exist. He had startling blue eyes as a newborn, but in the last two years they somehow turned a colour that is both fire and storm.
“This child is so wild!” I crowed jubilantly one time, as I caught him doing something or other. Quick as a whip, he repeated it after me, intonation and all, cackling.
Motherhood is not all-consuming, for me. I can’t let it be.
And yet everything I do, I do to ensure that this firebrand that I’m stewarding through a world gone insane grows up safe, healthy, and overflowing with love.
I’m keeping myself whole through this very intense season of parenting so he can be free, and it starts with him becoming free of me. I work on pleasing myself, filling myself up, so that I won’t cling to this person that I love more than anything else in the world.
As he grows, every day is another a little breakup, another little goodbye. Every day I know he needs me a little less than he did the day before.
I feel the loss together with the freedom. I luxuriate in his cuddles and kisses and little pats on my belly, his first home, and I also celebrate every time he says, “I need some space, Mama.”
I’ve filled him with enough love that he can say “go away!” and still know where I am if he needs me.
I fill myself with sunshine, sex, love, joy from outside, distill it all into something purer and stronger to pour into him, something clean and real, stripped of artifice, that will build and fortify his soul.
What’s that saying? It’s a little perverse to try to make a sweater for a sheep out of his own wool. Or something like that. I don’t want to do that to my child.
The energy I bring to him, I bring fresh. I bring new.
I tattoo the intention across my heart and pray to my ancestors on the hour, every hour. Please let me never say or even think the poison my mother has poured into my ear for over thirty years, “I gave up everything for you. You owe me.”
He doesn’t owe me shit.
I gave up nothing.
Se nos rompió solo un plato, no toda la vajilla
Y aunque no sé poner la otra mejilla
Aprender a perdonar es de sabios
Que solo te salga amor de esos labios