CLOSE YOUR EYES
Either I have been alone
Every hour of my life or
Never once, not even
One moment, and the mist rising.
– Donald Revell, “Senesco Sed Amo”
Our capacity for attention slips and slides and is at all times imperfect, but God’s gaze on us never wavers.
By Alice Courtright
My first daughter, Margaret, was born in New Hampshire. After my last cry of pain, she came out of me in a great flow of water. The doctor put her on my chest and I held her against my skin. Her eyes were closed, and her small mouth looked like it was in a pout. Her lower lip jutted out. I smiled and thought, She liked it better inside.
Margaret was born on the first day of spring. As soon as I was strong enough, I took her walking by the ponds near where we lived on the expansive campus of St. Paul’s School. I positioned the baby with her face against me in the carrier, and she slept while I walked and sang her my favorite James Taylor song. This old world must still be spinning around, and I still love you.
It took me a long time to grapple with the unfamiliar sensations of motherhood: the wild joy, the way milk would build in my breasts, the anxiety. My heart ached with love toward my baby. For hours each day, it was just the two of us, mother and child, sitting on the old red couch, being together, looking at each other. It was an intimate time. We had each other’s full attention. Margaret had golden fuzz on the tops of her ears for the first year of her life. I called her my little woodland creature.
Summer came, and then fall. Now the edge of the pond was lined with orange, yellow, and red between the evergreens, and the colors reflected in the water. Soon, the trees dropped their leaves and the ponds started to freeze. Margaret was more wakeful. For so long, her small body had been curled up, like it was still in my womb. In the winter, she began to unfurl. I strapped her to my chest again, but this time I turned her outward to face the world.
—
In January, snow crunched under my boots. Small huts popped up on the frozen ponds, way out from where I stood on the boathouse docks. Men were drilling down through the ice, catching fish, and smoking pipes. I saw everything from a distance.
When I stopped swaying and singing, there was silence. Then I heard the wind blowing through the pine trees, and the sound of the highway to my left. Margaret and I breathed in the cold air. When we exhaled, our warm breath condensed, holding suspended before us and then dissipating. I felt aware of Margaret’s life, of her metabolic action apart from my own. Her hair had grown in ginger-colored, like my husband’s.
Behind us, there was the dirt road and the white pines. The trees were so tall I had to lean back to see their tops and the sky above them. Before us, there seemed to be only space. The sun reflected off the snow that dusted the pond. The long white stretch of frozen water glittered. The scene looked tranquil, but the huts reminded me of movement, and of work. I had the strange sensation that my life was slowly starting to separate from the world as I had known it. I was entering a different, slower way of experiencing time. I spent so many hours watching and being with my baby that it was changing what and how I took in the scenes before me. There was so much to bask in, so much going on under the surface of what I could see. Everything before me seemed miraculous and also mysterious. What hardy creatures were swimming in these cold waters under the ice, circling the bait and nibbling the lines?
I am my daughters’ witness. But who is witnessing me?
Years passed, and I became the mother of not just one, but three girls. My attention, so present with my first daughter, began to splinter between the children and the demands of our home. I nursed my second daughter, Lucy, as I followed the toddling Margaret around the house. I rocked my third daughter, Caroline, with one arm, while reading a story to the big girls. Dishes piled up, and so did the laundry. I started to treasure the moments when I could lift my head from the flurry of activity and remember the miracle and mystery of life.
One late November afternoon, I put on my gray wool coat to greet my daughters at the bus stop. It was a cold day, and I waited on the front stoop, hoping the house would shelter me from some of the biting wind. My littlest one was napping inside. I put my hands in my pockets and felt pretzel crumbs there. After a while, I heard the brakes of the long yellow school bus and saw it turning the corner toward me. I walked fifty yards to the designated stop and waved. The doors opened and the bus driver, Mr. Jean, greeted me. He’s very patient with the children, and he drives the creaky bus carefully.
My two girls, Margaret and Lucy, ran down the steps and into my arms. We walked back toward the house. I felt bits of cold pricking my cheeks. I shifted my gaze from the house to the space before my body. Thick white snowflakes were falling through the air. How had I not seen them? I’d felt them first. “Girls,” I exclaimed, “it’s snowing!” They flung their backpacks on the front lawn and ran around, catching the drifting flakes on their tongues.
Margaret will be eight in March, and Lucy’s five-and-a-half. After a snack, I got Margaret ready for ballet, brushing her hair into a low bun. When my husband, Drew, came home from work, the girls yelled, “Dad! There was a flurry!” and the baby, Caroline, woke up. Drew got her from the crib and took her with him to the dance studio, so Lucy and I had a rare afternoon together, just the two of us. We got ready for our time. We made a list: creek, library, hot chocolate, Lego, pasta, reading. We drove to the church parking lot and headed into the glebe with three collecting jars. Lucy kept stopping to pick up pebbles and acorns and sticks. I watched the last snowflakes float out of the sky and fall to the forest floor.
The creek wasn’t high. Lucy opened the jars to fill them with water. She leaned over the current and plunged her hand in, filling all three by herself. I’ve noticed that she asks for things in threes, and at home, she carries around three stuffed animals: a cheetah, a snow leopard, and a tiger. She’s the middle of three sisters. I was the middle child too, though I have an older brother. I know how it is to be caught in the center of a family. I gave her a thumbs up from the bench, and Lucy scrunched up her face to one side—she’s learning to wink.
I find my daughters’ growth gratifying and amusing. Lucy surprises me with her vocabulary. “Sophie was absent, today, Mommy,” she says. “This water is filthy.” She tests out new sounds with her tongue, and experiments with putting words into sentences. I listen and tuck a loose strand of yellow hair behind her ear. She has a bright, curious face. I can sense how important my attention is to her. I want to give it to her more often, and it pains me that I cannot. I pull her close to me and whisper love into her ear. You are my treasure, I tell her. I love you with my whole heart. I have to trust it’s enough for her, this offering her what I can, when I can. I have to let go and trust that God will fill in the blanks.
—
In the evening, after the kids go to bed, quiet settles in the house. Drew does a final round of dishes, watching a Carolina basketball game. My husband and I are very close, and we try to make time to listen and care for one another every day. But this season of having young children is unrelenting and intense. Drew and I share so much of our lives, yet the children demand the majority of our attention. Much goes by for both of us each day without acknowledgement, each of us carrying our own load.
I hug him from behind at the sink and head downstairs. I place Lucy’s jars on top of the bookshelf and take our dog, Finlay, out to the park behind our backyard. He runs around the edge of the woods, and I watch a full moon rise over the baseball field. The park is empty, and mostly lawn. Tonight, it looks eerie in the moonlight—unnatural and bare. I find myself longing for the thick forests that used to cover this naked land. I think of Lucy in the glebe, jumping from root to root, gathering a swath of moss from a log, looking back at me. I delight in her, in how free she feels in the woods.
I look around the park and see the empty playground. I feel my breath, rising and falling in my chest. I remember myself, and my own life. My throat begins to tighten. I am my daughters’ witness. But who is witnessing me?
Soft snow flies down again and touches my face. I’m standing still, listening to the wind, staring into the space all around me. I close my eyes and feel my ears opening. I am always with you, the Lord says. I will never forget you.
Receiving the attention of God has transformed my life.
Inhabiting the role of motherhood has expanded my capacity for attention, but it has also taught me more about my limitations, and about my own need to be seen. The theologian Judith Wolfe calls roles (like, mother of young children) “temporary scaffolds.” How and why do we enter them? What do we do when our roles extend beyond our human capability, or fail to complete us? At a 2022 lecture at St Andrews, Wolfe invited her listeners to set aside the modern conflict between fixed roles and the quest for authenticity. Her long brown hair was pinned up, and she wore a silver brooch at her neck. Over her clothes she wore a black academic gown. What if, she asked,
…the deepest wellspring of who we are and how we are to orient ourselves in the world is found neither in fixed and impersonal values, nor in the bastion of our inner selves, but in the calling and love of God? The Psalmist rushes to praise God—“for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” He recognizes that God’s thoughts about us are precious and more numerous than the sand. “When I awake,” he adds, “I am still with thee.” St. Paul suggests that it is not in introspection, but in allowing ourselves to be seen by God that we both are and know ourselves—for now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face. Now I know only in part, but then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.”
This, Professor Wolfe concludes, is more than an intellectual conviction. It is a living hope, an “eschatological promise.”
I do believe God’s thoughts about us are precious, more numerous than the sand. He looks at me in my small life, even if I don’t know how to look back at Him. “God,” writes Richard Rohr, “is the One who shares your deepest subjectivity.” Only God knows how sweet a slice of golden pineapple tastes in my mouth, how tender little Caroline’s cheek feels against my own, how exhausted I sometimes feel waking up to another day of child-rearing.
Receiving the attention of God has transformed my life. I see myself through His eyes, and I feel Him caring deeply for me as I serve my family one day at a time. I trust that it’s Christ, and not me, who is the one standing between my daughters and the world, who is inside their deepest subjectivity and their private pain. With God, we are each fully known, even if I do not comprehend what that level of knowing entails. There’s nothing I need to figure it out from within, nothing I need to do to earn the attention of God. I’ve always been in the Lord’s gaze. I always will be. Such is the attention of God: it stills and quiets the soul. It calls and draws me forth.
My youngest daughter, Caroline, loves to be held and seen. Don’t we all? On the Outer Banks last summer, she stood on the sand and called for my attention, again and again. “Look, Mama! Look at me!” she cried, holding up her bucket. Her uncut white curls lifted in the wind, and her skin was coated with sand. The wide blue Atlantic spread out behind her, just warm enough for swimming. “I see you, my bundle,” I reply, again and again. She’s seen through my eyes, but I sense that a much greater gaze than my own beholds her, stretching beyond and through time. I walk down to the water with her, and we let the waves wash over our toes. Her sisters run up and down the beach behind us.
Before bed, Caroline asks me to rock her. She turned two a few months ago. “Rock-a-bye, Mama,” she says. I lift her up and hold her sideways in my arms. She’s over thirty pounds now. Caroline presses her face to my chest and stares up at me. Close your eyes, I sing, swaying her.
You can close your eyes, it’s alright.
I don’t know no love songs, and I can’t sing the blues anymore.
But I can sing this song.
And you can sing this song when I’m gone.
I put her down in the crib and rub her back. I sense a tremendous, gentle presence looking over me, loving through me. I breathe it in and rest my hand on her body. We’re not alone.
Photos provided by the author
Illustrations by Sarah Clark
Alice Courtright is a poet and writer living in New York with her family. She is ordained in the Episcopal Church and her writing has been recently published in The Hedgehog Review and Mockingbird.
