The Guest in the Driveway

When I first moved to Florida, Leif and I had a little cottage next door to us that we had the good fortune of AirBnB-ing out to travelers near and far. Inclined to be a hermit, I mostly ran and hid from the travelers as they pulled in the driveway, preferring to leave the small talk aspect of the business to Leif, who was born with the capacity to say “goodbye” with ease and without guilt.

But once in a blue moon, a woman would book with us who lived locally, a new mom whose partner would occasionally gift her with an evening to herself. When she pulled into the driveway, I knew to do something different. I had never had much exposure to new moms and new babies, and had pretty much sworn off parenthood, but had enough sense to know that this woman needed a warm hello, a simple kind greeting, a welcome to acknowledge the big-ness of this overnight stay.

When she arrived, she would stand silently in the driveway for a long while, gazing around, looking wild-eyed and half-dazed. We would then make eye contact, I would offer some small show of kindness, and she would begin to cry. I would come toward her to hug her, and found an embrace that spoke a language that I felt but could not fully understand. It told me that, even though she had only driven across town, she had journeyed across worlds. It told me her body was a survivor. It told me this one night was a sip of water in a vast desert she’d been traversing for years.

We didn’t talk much. I didn’t know anything about becoming a new mom, couldn’t relate, and she needed the quiet more than anything. But each and every time she came to visit, that ritual would play out between us.

Fast forward five years, and I am now that woman in the driveway. Next weekend is my birthday, and for the first time, I will stay two nights alone at a cottage in the woods. It’s been two and a half years of motherhood, 913 plus nights, and I have never spent one of them away from Ami.

I am partially excited, and partially terrified. Questions I never imagined are arising: Will Ami be okay without me? Will I be okay without her? Will she be able to fall asleep with Leif? Will she miss me in the morning? Will she wean herself in those two days? Will we lose the most perfect, most tender ritual of “boob-night” where she breastfeeds to sleep? Will I even know who I am without her present? Who am I, after all? Do I still exist as a human, outside of being a mom?

Giving birth, after all, was a death. The death of the fierily independent bohemian, the death of the fearless vagabond, the death of my-needs-over-all-needs. An entering through an invisible portal and becoming completely undone in the process. A complete loss of freedom I would have cursed and spit at in previous decades.

Mom-ness became all-consuming, filling up every “free” minute and hour outside of work (which had come to feel like vacation). Though Ami blessedly is more independent now, allowing us adults to have intermittent three-minute conversations, and even occasionally go to the bathroom by ourselves, the identity of mother, of her-and-me-together, occupies every cell. Keeping her safe and nourished is my number one priority. Life is very much her-needs-then-my-needs, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I had no idea – I couldn’t know – that as our AirBnB guest stood in the driveway, she was feeling in her body questions as to who she was, whether she in fact still existed, and whether her child would be okay without their morning ritual. I couldn’t have known the weight of them, the realness of them, the way in which togetherness is sown in, seeps in, into muscles, into bones, into the fabric of souls. I couldn’t have known the stark and sudden nakedness of being without one’s child, the disorienting shock of “just me,” the ways that utter delight and ecstasy interweave with terror and desolation.

Next weekend away will be a journey not just a few dozen miles away to a cottage in the woods, but a journey to discover, through the haze and the daze of the daily, all-encompassing rituals, whom the heck I have become, what in me has died, and what, if anything, has been born.