Strega Nona

Today I woke up at 5, I brought snack to child's school, went to work all day downtown, and I forced myself to go for a walk on my lunch break. I came home to cook a fresh dinner, feed child one bite at a time to implant nutrients into the child's body, clean the kitchen and bathroom, put away laundry, do the dishes, practice guitar, water plants, bathe child, read to child, snuggle child to sleep. At 10 p.m., I'm finally sitting down to begin more legal research. But the longest part of my day was definitely holding space for my child's broken heart after his closest friend told him they weren't going to be friends anymore. He came home from school, climbed into bed, and soaked his sleeves. At first he didn't want to talk about it, but then he just asked devastating question after question about why people leave us and how to get through loneliness. After we found some peace, we kept coming back to the topic throughout the night. His world has two different timelines now: one where he used to have a best friend, and the one he's living in now ("Back when that picture was taken, she was still my best friend and now she's not."). I tried to tell him that he wasn't alone in that feeling, and that it's happened to me too. In fact, I told him, I'm currently working through changes with the people I care most about. And that's true.

"Mom, what do you do when you can't stop thinking of something sad no matter how hard you try to stop?"

And God, I wish I knew. I told him that I try to remember I won't feel this way forever. That new ideas and feelings usually come to rent out our empty left-behind spaces. That people don't always understand what their words mean, and we have to advocate for our own feelings while also respecting others' boundaries. That this is an opportunity to be open to something new that I might not have noticed before. That even when we are lonely, we aren't really alone. That we have to try to focus on the people who ARE here. But really, that we're just gonna feel sad, the both of us. We don't have to fix that, and the best thing we can do is feel it with each other nearby.

I did the only other thing I knew how to do, which is what my own mother did to help me with my big feelings: remind him that I am a safe place to set those big feelings down. I put soft pajamas on him and brushed his hair and read him Strega Nona -- a book where the whole village eats from a magic pasta pot together until the city overflows with noodles (thanks, Big Anthony). Otto hates this book. He never chooses it over Ninja Turtles or Paw Patrol, but tonight he was too tired to make decisions. And so I pulled the coziest, silliest, simplest book that still has my handwriting in it from 25 years ago. The pictures are old and nobody fights a bad guy, and it's five minutes to be just five years old.

The hardest part of being a single parent is knowing that you can't just walk by the dishes after dinner and hope that someone else is going to help clean up or put down the clean laundry basket and think that someone other than you is going to do the rest. But it's also knowing that you can't avoid the tough conversations when your kid is buried in his blankets. It's just you. You're up to the plate, every time. And there isn't someone to make eye contact with across the room or come up with the words when you can't speak. And when you survived the moment, and convinced your kid to eat dinner and play a few games and wash his own hair, there isn't someone to tell you that you got it right, or to let you take a rest. There is no one to give you a grown up Strega Nona moment. Sometimes single parenting is traveling the world and going out for doughnut dates and becoming best buds with your baby. But sometimes it's crying in the shower and stroking your own hair to sleep at midnight.

I guess there isn't really a point to this post, other than to catalog these kinds of moments so that maybe the me of the future can reach back into time and space and tell the me of tonight, "You got it right. You can rest now."