Journal

I wanted to do things really well after my daughter was born.

No, I wanted to do them perfectly.

While I was pregnant, I would watch a mother drag her screaming toddler out of a store and imagine offering perfect discipline that would prevent such an episode. I would see a disheveled mother tossing her kid out of the car at school, cold toast in her hand, and imagine how my perfectly scheduled day would allow us to arrive on time, if not early.

Maybe it’s that I didn’t sleep well last night. Maybe it’s that I’m stressed about building a business. Or maybe it’s just one of those times in my life when I have walked the edge of the cliff for too long and am getting ready to jump beyond where I am. It doesn’t really matter why. It is, and that is enough.

It’s just after 1:00 p.m. My three-year-old daughter and I make the slow walk from her school back to our home. It is a walk that takes me seven minutes alone, but with her, we take about a half hour. It’s filled with questions: What’s that flower? What’s under that pile of leaves? Why is that man walking? And of course, there is time to say hello to her friend Gustavo, who owns the hardware store down the street.

This is her time. A time to meander and to not be pushed. A space to become fully immersed in that timeless state of childhood that I am sad to admit is not possible in all other parts of her day.

I’m not going out tonight.

We have an invitation. A party under the stars and next to a fire, filled with people we love. But I am tired. So I will stay in instead.

My daughter called to me from her carseat, her voice tinged with sleep. The four-hour drive to our new home in a small Mexican town was overlapping with her naptime, but there was no other way to do it. The road was empty except for us, so I picked her up out of her carseat, wrapped her in my scarf, and nursed her to sleep on my lap. As she dozed in my arms, I watched a dog take off running at top speed along a row of restaurants. Something about the freedom of its movement, unhindered by cages or leashes, stirred some ancient part of me.

The only thing that is more challenging than spending all morning at a Mexican government office waiting for your visas to be processed is spending the whole morning at a Mexican government office waiting for your visas to be processed with a toddler…whose parents forgot her snack.

There is very little one can do about this kind of situation besides take a number, go to the bodega across the street, buy a couple bananas, and wait.

I write this as my daughter is crying in the bedroom. My husband is in there with her, trying to coax her to put on her pajamas and get into bed. At the surface is her desire to watch a cartoon show, a rare treat for her. We don’t own a television and rarely even show her our phones, but she is learning to use the potty and her reward for a good poop is to see an episode of a show about this friendly tiger kid she loves.

We have moved. Twice. Once from a tiny island across an ocean, then to a different country. My daughter is 2½, and cannot understand what would make us uproot everything she’s ever known and move to a place where her mother’s seven years of Spanish classes fail to meet all her needs.

It has been a very intense time of mothering. She cries for me nonstop. She clings to my neck like a 30-lb monkey, terrified about the way the stairs look, or that strange sound in the distance. She wakes in the night and yells my name. It is as if she needs to know that I did not sneak off while she was sleeping and hop on another airplane. Yes, my love, I say, Your mama is here.

I like the skins on sweet potatoes. I enjoy their texture and I like knowing that there are nutrients in them. I also don’t particularly like peeling them. It adds an extra step that is not necessary, which makes a difference in the limited time I have to cook us a meal. But she doesn’t like them. If I leave the skins on anything — sweet potatoes, carrots, grapes, even chickpeas — she sticks out her tongue and spits until the offending characters out of her mouth. Perhaps the texture is too much for her smooth baby tongue. Or maybe she doesn’t have the right technique to adequately grind the skins down with these new teeth of hers. My job is to smooth the rough road ahead of her, so I peel the sweet potatoes before I put them in the food we will share.

I lived on Kauai for the past two years. During that time I never seemed to see the news. No one I knew had televisions and I almost never saw a paper. But as we are transitioning our life to Mexico, I have been stationed at my in-laws’ house in a suburban purgatory for a month. This is my vacation to the rest of the world. Here, the news is a part of life.

It’s not that I value being uninformed. Quite the contrary. It is that I value learning what I need to learn without taking a healthy dose of fear alongside it. It is possible to do this, though it does take a bit of work because everyone has a slant, including me.