Musings in Motherhood: Part I

There was once an abbess in Mallorca who didn’t leave her room for thirty years. Daily, she would look from her balcony towards the same neighboring façade fragment. One day, she finally came out, crossed over, and asked the neighbor if she could see the convent from the outside. “It is very pretty,” she said, and went back in after the longest journey. 

I feel like the character from this story—being back in my homeland, Costa Rica, for an uncertain period of time at my sister’s—feeling things differently in the vastness and the longest journey that is everyday within and within the house. 

My two-year-old and I left his father in Spain and have come to make it a full house along with my niece, nephews, and brother-in-law; together we are catching each other while drifting, we’ve come to understand each other’s language, joys, concerns, and silences. 

I can’t get off of my mind the girl that I saw from the car at dawn on my way to the airport. We gazed at each other and communicated in an animalistic and ancestral way: be careful, be safe, may you get where you need to. She was carrying a suitcase making the rhythmic noise while rolling it down the circle—patterned sidewalks of Barcelona. Perhaps she had packed like me, against time, filling the suitcase with basics...and irrational things. 

The first days having arrived I also remember being irritated by a conversation I had with a friend, feeling her resistance: bodies, boundaries, biopolitics, immigration, human rights, a whole conversation that sometimes we don’t have the energy to follow through with, and must. We all have our story.

It is interesting how the experience of our daily lives has so much to do with the objects that we relate to. Sometimes I like to remind myself of some colorful items that I have hanging in my closet on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, just as a playful way to awake the paused possibilities. I like to recreate in my mind the slight differences in sensation they would provoke. The same applies for the objects here, such as the coffee glass or even the way I distribute everything with another order due to the nature of space, how I move around differently between the pillow, the crib, the toothbrush, the diary, the charger. I can tell the passage of time through my selection of things, how the fiber in a certain pair of socks starts to deteriorate or how Salva’s sandals no longer fit his growing feet. 

Somehow, there are things that have earned an additional respect, like my Thai fishermen pants. They have been my warrior pants during the long hot morning hours with Salva as the day divides in slots of short attention spans, active curiosity leading to potential danger, emotions quickly climaxing and oscillating from fiery peaks to hushed moments, and an exhaustion that can only be proportional to a boundless tenderness and love where I keep melting and reconstituting myself.

Salva will relate with Marc through his things sitting in the shelves in Barcelona. He gets pleasure when Marc evokes his life in interlude at the other side of the screen and proposes for his dad to read him a book that is here, until he remembers inventory and locations, and asks to listen to one from over there. “I want to go there,” he told me once pointing at the mobile phone and breaking my heart. Sometimes, he will play hide and seek—while I distract myself as they chat—and hide his father somewhere, probably under the mattress.

I cannot explain it, but some objects have saved me: a whole plastic animal front, particularly, the stingray and the squid. While playing “monster” or “catch me if you can,” Salva eventually says, “Don’t worry mom, I will save you.” “Yes, baby, I agree, more than you know, several times a day.” His name even spells it. 

Different objects even change the quality of light of our experiences, as it is refracted by new surfaces within our reach.

As my own cathartic ritual, of understanding myself navigating these days, I keep photographing the expressions of light; it never ceases to impress me how despite its beauty and changing character, light keeps passing the night and the day detached of any emotion.

In the room where we are staying—the one with my niece’s new bed, which I have already used more times than herself—there’s an ample window with wooden blinds framing in horizontal. 

It is as if I have more time to observe now. I can see the small light flickering exactly from behind the treehouse’s window, as if perforating everything all the way to the hidden crevice this repetitive perception has left in me. Perhaps I am inside a pinhole camera and something about me is being revealed upside down out there. 

I now know the neighboring sounds, the security routine of the man in his night shift along with its accompanying sounds. I try to match the acoustics with a hint of light from this stranger breathing somewhere on the other side of the fence. I keep track of the encounters between the iguana and the cat because between 3 and 4 AM I am always awake; my body knows that I have another life running in an active time zone in another place. This is when I visit Salva’s crib and stay at his side until my eyes get used to seeing dark against dark. I look at his sleeping face and find the halo of light on the edge of his cheek. I feel at ease being more and doing less as light permeates.

The negative space from the dark sky turns to positive space during daybreak. Suddenly, the blinds have a warm tone, the yellow watercolor sunrise manifests in the wood as it contrasts with the colder shade corresponding to the patches of trees. Inside, the white walls have dancing ephemeral lines. Outside, the woodpecker confirms the morning is unfolding. As we close the dry cycle and open the rainy season, this window has become our sanctuary. Salva and I snooze snuggled and submerge in deliciousness.

Text and Photography by Andrea González Maroto