That smudge, though? It’s not a flaw. It’s the proof of life. It’s the thumbprint of presence. It’s the mark that says you were there, in the trenches, reaching in to wipe the face of someone who needed you.
I looked at the blurry Tuesday photo one more time. She was right. It wasn’t sad. It was just the truest thing I’ve ever taken. A smudge on the lens. A whole world inside it.
So here is my prayer for us, the Muthas : May we stop trying to polish the lens. May we stop comparing our blooper reels to other people’s highlight reels. May we see the blur for what it is—motion, chaos, love, the frantic beautiful mess of raising humans while still trying to be one ourselves. allison carr mutha magazine
This is what I want to tell the woman who is reading this in the bathtub while her partner wrangles the toddler, or the one hiding in the Target parking lot for ten extra minutes just to hear herself think. You are not failing because your kitchen is a disaster zone. You are not a bad mother because you did not make the sensory bin from Pinterest. You are not broken because you sometimes miss the silence.
There is a specific grief in that realization. Not a tragedy, but a low-grade mourning for the woman you used to be—the one who could read a novel for three hours on a Sunday, the one whose body belonged only to her, the one who didn’t know the precise texture of vomit at 2:00 AM versus 4:00 AM. We don’t talk about that grief enough. We talk about postpartum depression and anxiety (thank god, finally), but we don’t talk about the mundane melancholy of missing your old self while simultaneously holding the new self you would die for. That smudge, though
My daughter is two years old, which means she has recently discovered the power of the emphatic “No.” But more importantly, she has discovered my camera roll. The other day, while waiting for her oatmeal to cool, she grabbed my phone. I braced for the inevitable butt-dial to my editor or a rogue FaceTime to my ex-husband. Instead, she went quiet. She was scrolling through photos of herself.
But she was right, and she wasn’t. She wasn’t sad in that photo. She was furious. And I was exhausted. And the two feelings had occupied the same square inch of our kitchen floor. Mutha readers know this space. It’s the space where the pristine fantasy of motherhood—the one sold to us in the glossy magazines at the pediatrician’s office—goes to die. It is replaced by something rawer, funnier, and infinitely more true. It’s the thumbprint of presence
“No, baby,” I said. “Not sad. Just… Tuesday.”