These Four Stories
By Jenna Brack
@jennabrackwriting
I was lumbering, sweaty, and 36 weeks pregnant. He was limping, hobbling, and using two crutches. We made quite a pair, the two of us—husband and wife, first-time homebuyers, soon-to-be first-time parents—one with a fully-expanded belly and the other with an injured knee. In spite of ourselves, maybe, we bought a 110-year-old home with three sets of stairs: a square shirtwaist with four levels in all, if you count the unfinished basement and one-room attic. He climbed up and down those creaking layers on crutches, and I fell down half a flight of steps, merely weeks away from birthing our son.
In the early days, I did not see the noisy hardwoods or dozens of projects as a problem (this was before I knew about the curse of creaking floors and sleeping babies). In those old walls and floors, I saw possibility: a place to launch into motherhood, to fly into something new. Wings outstretched, I was ready for a new home, a new challenge, a new life to shelter.
But if my expectations about motherhood involved a form of flight, home ownership and motherhood actually brought, in sudden tandem, boundaries and rootedness.
In a matter of minutes one July afternoon, my world became very focused—on 7 pounds, 7 ounces, and 19.5 inches, to be exact. The joy of motherhood was profound, winding itself around both my heart and body in coils of gratitude and awe.
But motherhood did not feel like flying. Motherhood felt like being rooted—to time and space, people and place. Days became hours. Hours became minutes. Every 1.5 hours, a tiny mouth needed food from my body. For reasons that were a complicated mix of choice and practicality, the start of motherhood also meant I became closely tied to our home, with its small yard, multiplying weeds, and eventually two sets of growing, chubby baby legs.
Almost seven years later, although other things have come and gone, nothing has remained so central to my days as these four stories—the ones made of brick and mortar that surround me, and the stories growing on legs and souls inside of them. Graciously, we have all survived the limping and the falling, and have now multiplied inside these walls—two of us becoming four, a handful of toys becoming dozens. The yard is small, but it has done its job of growing children, weeds, and memories.
Each morning, I wake up in the same place, with the same people, who have often crawled into my bed to escape the darkness. They whisper in my ear as the edges of the sun creep up: “Look at the light, mama! It’s wake-up time.”
The sun rises, my children bounce my head against the pillow and beckon me to greet this new day, my weary legs roll out of bed, and I trip across my sacred work scattered across the floor—legos and lives sprouting through the dust-covered floors in vibrant hues of red and yellow.
We do not fly through our days. But we do crawl and scoot, learn to walk and read. We build and tackle and pick-up and hug. We bump against each other, trip over each other, cry with one another, confess and forgive each other, shuffle stacks of colored paper and books between each other. We walk to the corner, collecting tiny sticks, singing songs, puzzling about caterpillars and butterflies and overgrown yard mushrooms.
Together, we stare up at the airplanes soaring overhead and imagine where they might be headed. These days, I do not know much about the sights and smells of worlds beyond my own, but I do know these hands in mine, these broken sidewalks, the cadence of these voices. I know what it feels like to be tethered to tiny legs and old brick. I know the daily process of seeing things grow in real time, from ground level.
Still, I feel a familiar fluttering at times; a desire to transcend time and space for a moment, to see things from a new perspective. Then, I tiptoe up the third flight of creaky stairs to the attic room, where I have made an office for myself—complete with kids’ toys and a whiteboard covered in preschool handiwork—and look out over this slice of world I live in. I know this view well. I can tell you which elbowing branches of trees hold squirrel nests, exactly how long it’s been since the paint colors have changed (or not) on each of the houses on the street, or where the roots of the old trees have raised and cracked the sidewalks. From here, beginning where I am—with all of the details that surround me—I take up my other slow and sacred work: writing stories.
Other times, when I need to leave the house but cannot actually leave the house, I go outside onto our front porch, where a donated white swing holds the weight of my thoughts, eases them gently back and forth, and sends them skyward for a brief visit. When we bought the house, the original porch was still standing, but it was sagging and bowed, bricks loose and crumbling. “I bet that porch is going to need fixed on our watch,” I commented. (“But it’s okay, we’ll fix it!” I thought, rather naively).
Five years later, the porch did indeed need fixed—a process much longer and slower than I had anticipated. We watched as the workers completely demolished the old porch, stacked up all of the bricks and stone, and began to rebuild the whole thing, using the original materials.
Now, as a surprise rain shower drenches my view of the street, I find myself surrounded by the same bricks, but with newly-supported beams. The pancake-y layers of our house shelter my head while syrupy rain folds down over them, the old porch swing holding both me and my words—words now running out of my fingers like water pouring from the gutters.
I see in a new way that these four stories—both built and lived—have been caring for me, even as I have been caring for them. Perhaps young motherhood has been a slower and longer work than I expected; it has certainly rearranged and re-shaped my expectations, in some ways. But from inside this story, I am also beginning to feel the edges of something new.
Every time those two children, who look a bit like me and a whole lot like themselves, hurdle handfuls of hardy weeds over the fence, I realize that even if their growth is nearly imperceptible on a daily basis, they are expanding, walking, running, and—all-too-soon—flying.
And in the gentle swaying of the porch swing and my fingers moving across the page, I sense my own nearly-imperceptible growth, too. Birds swoop in and out of our yard, perch on our house, then fly away to an unknown place. Someday, I may again join them. For now, I begin where I am, and add a few more words to the page in front of me. If I pay attention, it feels a bit like stretching out my wings.
Guest essay written by Jenna Brack. Jenna is a writer and teacher living in Kansas City. She has an M.A. in English and enjoys good coffee, serious conversation, and not-too-serious fiction. Find her on Instagram.
Photo by Lottie Caiella.