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Mother’s Day – it started with Tin in my lap on the toilet while I swayed back and forth. He had fallen and hit his tooth that is about to come out, the one he fell on more than a year ago when he fell on the bricks in front of the LaLa. The one the dentist said he would lose and has hung onto this long. Now it is coming out. Every time I went to get up, he would say, “Mommy, keep holding me, keep swaying your legs” and so we sat there rocking in the bathroom for twenty minutes and I wondered after a few minutes why on Mother’s Day, I’d want to be doing anything else than holding my baby on my lap, swaying and soothing him.

We went to Metairie and bought an electric dryer and left it there because the family had two kids and wasn’t leaving for two weeks and I didn’t need it for two weeks. We went to pick up our friends to head to Donaldsonville to the African American Museum. We spent the day there and listened to the vision of a woman who has been on a 19 year quest to change the status quo – she has done so much, and yet she has her work cut out for her.

We come home to sadness. New Orleans bleeding red, BIG RED, and no end in sight. I read the Facebook posts how everyone is disassociating themselves from what happened – as if they aren’t part of it; unmitigated sadness.

Before we got out of the truck, Tin said, “I love you Mommy” – out of the blue. It just came and was hanging there in the truck between both of us and I turned and said, “Thank you. That made my Mother’s Day.” I then watched as he transitioned to go to Tatjana’s house – the son I waited 50 years for, I grabbed him one more time and told him he had made me a mother. Him, and him alone. I wanted to cry but I have to keep these transitions neutral.

Tonight, with 19 people shot in a Mother’s Day second line, I wonder what to do – how to be a parent, how to deal with my separation anxiety when he’s not spending the night under my roof, how to live this life that holds me in its arms and sways me back and forth and then let’s me go.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 12th, 2013 at 9:41 pm and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.