A baby the size of a sugar bag rests on her chest, swaddled in flannel and a too-big crinkly-plastic diaper. The baby is nursing and the mother watches the small space of light that shows between her child’s eyelids almost closed. It is hard work, this sustenance gathering and the baby is focused, settling moment by moment into a rhythm, one small hand flailing a bit in the air. The mother takes the hand, settles it near her clavicle, covers it with her palm and holds: the first sheltering.
Next is the shelter of her head, her neck, her shoulders as her whole upper body curves down into a soft hook, catching her baby there, as if the space had always been so full. When someone else takes the baby – so the mother can rest, so the mother can stretch, so the mother can move – cold air rushes in as if a sudden small cavern is left, a void, an absence. When they give the baby back, she is again in curl, around her child: shelter.
Soon after comes the shelter of her knees and arms as she bends all day, half the night – down to shelter her baby from corners and edges, down to lay blankets, down to shoo-dogs and brothers back, down to scoop toys, and pile cheerios, and down over the crib edge, again and again, to pick up, rock, soothe, pat, grasp, to draw her baby close and in tune with her. Like instruments, their notes begin to meld together –shhhh-shhhh-song-song – her beat and sway and rock become the baby’s and there is shelter, there is sigh and release, the comfort that moves a small one toward sleep.
Eventually the need for shelter moves outside and into the jungle of others, into the tangle of things we know too well: hurt feelings, contests lost, bully-kids cutting with words, spelling tests.And then the down-hill slide into things we can’t imagine but are forced to every day: guns at school, speeding cars, germs and viruses the likes of T. Rexs running loose and hungry.
And so she shelters by opening and opening and opening the world for her child, even though she is afraid, even though her imagination can get the best of her, even though her baby is still and will always be hers to protect. She can’t help it.
He is 10 when his hamster dies and he rides his bike away. She is wowed by this, by his swoosh out of the garage, up the street, upset and zooming in the opposite direction of her comfort. She gives him time and then walks the block, seemingly with one eye out, but in actuality her whole body is primed in his direction – she could find him blindfolded.
He is up against the broken electric fence, watching the sway-backed horse, the pintos, the dingo running circles in the dirt and hoof prints.She touches her son’s nose, says she’s sorry his hamster died, and he is up and gone again, sweatshirt flapping.“I want to be alone.”
And so her next shelter she sends with him. She covers him, wraps him, swaddles him in everything she can muster and then points it in his direction. She pushes it out there, hoping it gets through, hoping he feels it as he rides away. And she lets him go this time, no intention of following.
This kind of shelter she may as well get used to. This kind of shelter she may as well get good at.
She will send him out and on and watch him walk away all the rest of her life – he will do this because he has her shelter with him, all around him, and always to come home to.
To this day, my mother comes when I call. I don’t wear her shelter. I don’t tuck it away. I don’t fly home to feel it again. I turn and move from within it like swimming in water, her all around me still.
It’s where I started from, and where she started from and things essential never change. We build on them, move them forward into another generation, cover our own like we were covered. We give them what we know they need – so they can ride away, sweatshirts flapping, our shelter wrapped tight around them.
