After I posted See You on the Other Side, I kept returning to one word.
We’re finally healed.
My children are. Parts of them that had disappeared beneath years of medical trauma, shielding, school and instability are coming back. They are growing now, not just recovering.
That is the part I did not expect. For a long time I was watching for recovery — for the old self to surface again. But somewhere this year it stopped being only recovery. The weeks filled up. Aerial gymnastics. Pottery. Canoeing. Friends. A life expanding outward.
They are not just healing. They are running.
And I am so glad. I would not have it any other way.
But I have started to notice something I did not have words for.
It is like a race I carried them through.
For years I carried them. Through the emergencies, the shielding, the losing of our home. I ran the whole course with them on my back because they could not run it themselves.
Now they have rested. They are strong enough to run.
So they do. They run on ahead.
And I am trying so hard to keep up. But I am the one who carried them the whole way here, and every step costs me more now than it used to.
Their nervous systems are learning that the world can hold adventure again.
Mine is still carrying everything it learnt when the world could not be trusted to hold them.
Today we are going to aerial gymnastics.
One of the other mothers will join in. She’ll get up on the silks with them, full of life, and she’ll be good at it.
Old me would have loved that. Old me would have been up there too.
New me sits on the bench.
Not because I won’t. Because my body holds a cost theirs does not, and there is only so much of me to spend. I have to save it for the moments they need me most — the regulating, the planning, the watching. So I ration. I sit out the silks so I can still stand up when it matters.
And this is the part that costs twice. Because I so badly do not want to hold them back. So even as I ration, I push — I keep up when I cannot afford to keep up, I say yes to the thing that will cost me days, because the alternative is being the reason they cannot run. The fear of holding them back makes me spend what I do not have. The cost is physical. The refusing to let it show is its own cost on top.
And my children see it. They see the other mother full of vitality on the mat, and they see their own mother on the bench again.
I miss so much as they move forward. Not because they leave me behind, but because my body holds the cost of getting them here. The cost was always going to land somewhere.
It landed on me.
I would not change that. If it had to be carried, I am glad it was me who carried it. I would do the whole course again.
I still see last week’s class. The strength in their bodies as they climbed. The grace of the shapes they made in the air. The teacher telling me how strong my daughter was.
And I remembered that my body was that strong once. That graceful. That it moved with ease, and I never even knew what I had while I had it.
So of course hers does too. She moves through the world the way I used to, without knowing she is doing it, without knowing it is a thing that can be lost.
And I hope it never breaks like mine did.
That is the whole of it, really. Both at once —
that I would not have it any other way,
that there is a sadness anyone had to pay this cost at all,
and that if a cost had to be paid, let it be mine and not hers. Let her run the whole course and never know what it takes to carry someone through it.
They run on ahead.
I keep walking.
Every step costs more now.
But they are running. They have what I had
.
And for this stretch of the course, that is enough
.