She wants me in her room while she gets dressed, standing in the closet or sitting on the edge of the bed, and what I actually want, more than almost anything at 7:40 in the morning, is to be downstairs with a cup of coffee that is still hot, not held in my hand as a prop while I answer questions about whether a dress needs pants underneath it.
Yes, you can wear the dress. You need pants or shorts under it — if you climb up on the jungle gym today, you don’t want people seeing your undies. Yes, it’s fine with that dress. You don’t need a special shirt, just put it on like a regular shirt — it’s a shirt dress. There you go, you got it, good job. That’s the whole conversation, more or less, on a loop, patient and useful and completely normal, the kind of thing you’d hear through a wall and think, that’s a nice mom in there, having a nice morning with her kid.
And meanwhile I am standing in the closet with my phone in one hand, because I’m almost always holding it, and in the other hand I’ve got a pair of pajama pants that I’m folding, just automatically, just because they’re in my hand and folding is apparently what my hands do now without asking permission, and there is something happening in my stomach that I can only describe as knives. Not a metaphorical unease. An actual physical sensation of blades, floating, somewhere behind my ribs, while I watch her — she’s five — pull a third shirt out of her drawer to ask if she can wear it and drop the first two on the floor without even looking at where they land.
Those aren’t just clothes on the floor. I fold her laundry every single week — how does a five-year-old generate this volume of dirty pajamas, I genuinely don’t understand it — and I don’t just fold it, I fold it well, corners square, stacked, the drawer-standing-up Marie Kondo thing, every week, and it only becomes visible in the two seconds it takes to get undone.
Yes, dear reader, I hear you. I don’t have to be so anal retentive about folding the laundry. But it’s my thing. Seeing it all organized in the dresser brings me so much joy — everything color coordinated. Just let me be.
I didn’t clock any of this in the closet. The knives were there, but I didn’t know what they meant until hours later, sitting here writing it down.
So, sitting here: is this about tidiness? No — the dining room table is a disaster. School papers, her art that’s somehow already four inches thick, a project I started three weeks ago and haven’t touched since, how many trees does one five-year-old’s classroom go through anyway. I don’t lose sleep over any of it.
It’s this specific thing. Work I did, that existed, finished, undone in front of me while I’m still holding the undoing in my own hand.
It’s not that I need someone to notice the folding. It’s that folding well, keeping a system that runs, that’s a kind of care, a kind of craft even, and it gets treated like it doesn’t exist until it stops existing. You don’t get credit for the system. You just get the questions when it breaks.
And here’s the part that actually stopped me, sitting here writing this out: on the surface, I was a mom in a closet helping her kid pick out an outfit, patient, useful, hands moving on autopilot. That’s the whole visible scene. Nobody watching would see anything but a normal Tuesday morning.
And underneath, at the exact same time, in the exact same three feet of space, I was in a full knife fight with myself that I didn’t clock until hours later, sitting down to write it out. The gap between the version of me narrating outfit logistics out loud, and the version of me having a whole reaction nobody, including me, noticed in real time — that’s not a one-time thing. That’s not even a today thing. That’s most mornings. That’s most of my life, probably, if I’m honest, and I only find out what was happening in the second version of me when I happen to sit still long enough to go looking.
I didn’t figure any of this out standing in the closet. It took sitting here, hours later, actually writing it down, to find the knives again and ask them what they wanted. That’s kind of the whole reason I started doing this — not because I have some backlog of profound realizations I’m dying to share, but because without a space like this, that reaction just stays lodged somewhere behind my ribs, unexamined, filed under “normal Tuesday,” and I go on to the next thing having no idea it happened.
I think that’s actually the practice, more than any single insight I land on. I gave the reaction somewhere to land, and once it landed, I could look at it instead of just carrying it — notice, oh, that’s what that was, instead of it just dissolving back into the general fog of things I felt but never named.
I don’t think that happens all at once. I think it’s the same reaction showing up again and again, a little closer to the surface each time, a little easier to catch in real time instead of hours later at a keyboard, until one day I actually notice it while it’s happening instead of after. And when I can hold it while it’s happening — actually see it, acknowledge it, maybe even thank it for telling me something true — I think that’s when it starts to loosen its grip a little instead of just sitting there as knives.
Which, honestly, might also mean I finally say something to her about cleaning up her own art projects. We’ll see which comes first.