Back in the Routine

Back in the Routine

“You either need to come and get me or I need my house key.”

I was in the kitchen getting a drink of water when the phone rang. My son who was visiting us from Brooklyn, New York was calling from a friend’s house. It was close to midnight.

“I have to get dressed and then I can pick you up.” I replied.

“Cool,” was the answering reply and my son hung up.

I donned my mommy’s hat, got dressed and removed my oral retainer.  I listened to the snores of my husband as I slipped out the front door.  I was thankful that I had left the car out of the garage and it was not raining buckets as it had been throughout the day.

I told my 31 year old son that he was lucky that I had been in the kitchen getting a drink of water and that I had had several hours of sleep so that I should be able to drive.  Fortunately for us, it was only an 8 minute drive back to our house as we live in a small town.  After I had crawled back into my bed still warm despite my absence, I realize how easily I had fallen back into my role as a full time mommy. 

I had spent a great deal of my time lately as a wife, a caregiver and grieving sister in the last couple of months.  The last was helping my husband after his surgery as his caregiver.  So it was only a matter of time before I lapsed into being a mommy again.  Somehow, once you have a child you never lose that aspect of your being.  It hides in your womb, it lingers in your heart and it nestles in the four chambers that beat sending blood throughout your body, the very same blood that once coursed through the growing mass that became a bouncing baby boy after a really great fun time in the hospital.

I am still waiting for the next stage in my life.  I am waiting for the writer to come forth, the one that will work without waiting for inspiration throughout the long night, the writer searching for her cup of coffee to help enabled the body and mind to continue putting words to a page hour after hour because she must.

I am definitely delusional as generally I head to bed soon after seven or eight o’clock in the evening, yawning, drooping and searching for my toothbrush and dental floss which at this moment has become a great feat of concentration.  Due to a crowned tooth breaking off at the gum line, I pay a great deal of attention to the flossing of my pearly whites while arming myself with my eyeglasses (all the better to see what I am doing) and all of the lights on in the bathroom and determination not to pop the tooth out again.  My dentist cemented it back in and said it was tentatively in.  Fear of smiling with my tongue poking through a gap in my tooth line has placed me in a very conservative state of mind.  Though my time with no tooth was very short and only overnight, I gained several insights.  I marveled at how soft the inside of my upper lip was.  It has been a stranger for most of the time as I have only explored the inside of my mouth with a quick swish of my tongue to check for left-overs. I found that the hole in the front of my mouth only looks good on a five or six year old. Having said that, I have become almost Zen like in my approach to food, carefully cutting up my egg sandwich so that I can shove it into the back of my mouth past the wounded warrior at the gate.  Each bite carefully chewed as my tongue guides and controls everything away from THE TOOTH.

I am definitely living in the moment.  It is quite like the slide back into the mommy mode that I experienced whenever our son is at home.   I enjoyed the mommy-ness. The doing that goes on, cooking, baking, sharing times of board games with my son and husband. It is the caring, the knowing that I am here for him, my moment with him is all that I have so I pay close attention.

The same goes for while I am eating I am enjoying the moment, savoring the favors, the texture of everything while concentrating on guarding the tooth from further harm.  I instinctively do that with my son, catering to the possible wants and needs of his immediate world in our house during his brief stay.  I only have a short time to get it right, as his stays with us are brief.  As for the tooth, its stay could be brief as my dentist told me, “It is tentative. “  So I am back in the routine or at least another routine of really practicing being in the moment, remembering that a wrong step or in my case a wrong bite will leave me smiling at you with my tongue waving through the hole in the wall.