I won’t have any more children. That’s for sure. How can one’s brain and heart fight this fact over a ragged trash can.
I never spoke or wrote, whether I desire to have more children, would I still give birth if I could?! Before anybody starts combinating, and makes my close family members shiver, I’ll write it down once more: I won’t have any more children. Some think that I should even have this many – after a bit more tiring day I can absolutely agree -, but too late to whine, I can’t change that. Others think that where five fit, a sixth could fit as well. Well, not exactly, because as five children are not four or three, six children are not five either.
Why am I writing about this now? Because on the last Saturday of February, 2017. something happened, that ultimately made me realize the end of a chapter, delivering many lessons, and opened many new doors as well.
The house-clearance was due on that particular day. I had started collecting the things that, in my opinion, we had nothing more to do with: broken clothes-horse, faulty, outgrown high chair (I still have some left, but only one and not three), gigantic paper boxes, which I was too lazy to cut into pieces and put into the selective garbage can, our dining chairs (which everyone hated), and some irreparable pieces of clothing.
And one more thing… a big, white plastic bucket which has been used as a trash can. It was ugly, dirty, used and smelly. Yes, smelly – as we have put all the used diapers in it for thirteen years. It was quite time to get rid of it. Still, when I saw it on the top of the little hill of things to be disposed, my hand shook for a moment…
We have said it for years with Husband, that our world will be a better place when we get rid of the poopcan. And now, some kind of sadness has mixed into the cloudless happiness of eventually having only housebroken children, that the amount spent on diapers will be flowing back into the family budget and that we can go out on the balcony without a gas mask.
With the feeling of freedom came the realisation: I will never ever change again, I won’t pick up a tiny and fluffy, szuszogó human being, to put a blanket under their naked bodies, so that they don’t shake when their backs touch the cold surface of the changing table… the problems coming with the changing of a diaper are enough for them, that I am picking them up, turning them around, I whip them around with something uncomfortable and strange, that makes my and their lives easier as well, but still… there should be something fondling and calming in this process besides a mother’s hands as well.
As I will not sleep facing towards a baby bed and showing my back to Husband, no one will rest on my chest halfway to sleeping after a big-big suckle, I won’t buy first pair of shoes in size 17 ever again and won’t hold the hands of a stumbling and tumbling little human with the height of my waist during their first steps. I won’t be a mother-to-be again, with all the beauty and pain of this era. Standing there with that can in my hand I felt all the pain of the world was mine.
Something is gone, and it won’t ever come back. And even though I know with my brain that everything’s right the way it is, and that our lives are round with five children, an uncountable amount of new experiences are still waiting for me, the heart is a different thing, especially when it feels, that its owner has arrived to a turning point. Did the sudden realisation hurt? Yes. A lot.
Somewhere deep in my mind I was aware of this fact, since I gift away Smallest’s outgrown clothes, I don’t put them away anymore, but somehow the movement, as I put that can out of our lives made the whole thing so definitive. One can buy new clothes – and many times it even feels good to freshen up the children’s collections with some new pieces, so that I don’t get to meet the same Nemo themed T-shirt again and again while folding the clothes -, but that white plastic box, without a lid had been a part of our lives for 13 years. It represented an era and a state, which has ended forever.
There, over that hill of trash, I started being jealous of the mothers-to-be with their big bellies and every woman who still have the opportunity before them, to live for and through, to suck these moments, minutes and days, inside themselves. Because one only gets to know what one lost when it’s already too late. Because every moment happens only once and no moment can be relieved. (Saying clichés? What a bluntness! But what could I do if I really feel this way?)
Do you know how many moments I missed from my motherhood because I could only see the cross in it, because I was slammed by the tiredness, maybe because of being afraid of the outer world, or with power, using my parental respect or maybe simply because of being cowardly, I tried to close them up while escaping from the scene, because they were uncomfortable and awkward?! Well, with the white can in my hand on the last Saturday of February I decided: from now on it will be different.
From now on I’ll try to feel and enjoy – or if one can’t enjoy the lying-on-the-ground type of hysteria of a child in their negativist crisis, at least still try to live it – every moment and the absolving catharsis coming with it (because even after the darkest moment comes the absolvation, the hug, the kiss, the apology, the calming of the shoutings and the logical reasons showing up one after another, etc.), which I can live with my children, even those which I’d rather skip, leave behind me or just run away from.
I live the rational part of my everydays quite consciously, one couldn’t do it any other way with five children. Although motherhood goes deep into my life, somehow in that case this is missing… not concerning the parenting, but the part full of feelings.
I want to enjoy my motherhood with all its annoyance and happiness, so that I never feel again: I missed something, I couldn’t catch something, that will never ever come back again. I’d round my life, the circle of my life.
And nothing else was needed for this but a house clearance topped with an old, used bucket masked to be a trash can. Life can always provide surprises… even after forty-four years.