Glass on the Kitchen Floor
Photo Courtesy | Jessica Lingren-Wu
BY ADEOLA SHEEHY
Sometimes things hit you all at once, almost as though it’s the aftershocks of an event that collapse the ground underneath you, rather than the moment of impact itself. The separation from my partner had been months before, but on a random sunny day, the tremors arrived.
I found myself standing by the kitchen sink, hands moving mechanically, eyes glazed as my mind rambled along a million miles away. Turning to answer to a child bellowing my name, the glass I was holding slipped through my fingers and met the floor. As I watched the glass break, I saw in that moment the shattered pieces of my family glimmering on the kitchen floor. I saw in each of the tiny reflective shards what might have been.
I saw family vacations and game nights. I saw moments of shared wonder as our eyes met over the tops of their heads. I saw firsts and milestones. I saw all of us together, but those images were ones I had collected and compiled into a narrative in my head about how things should be. Missing from the perfect family dinners, were the grumbles of ‘not this again’ or ‘I want something else’, the reality of me banging my head under the table as I swept up the amazing amount of food debris my youngest can create. Missing was the reality of siblings bickering rather than having scintillating conversation. I knew that I could scroll through my photo albums of family holidays and see frame after frame of smiling faces, frozen moments that in reality existed alongside the tired feet and bored teens not captured for posterity.
Yet somehow, these perfect shards of two-point-four domesticity made me feel as though even as a ‘complete’ family I was failing, so now as a ‘broken home’ surely, they would remain forever out of reach. I had created an illusion for myself of what family should be from images of captured moments, rather than aiming only for a life based on my experience and the real people in it.
We hold a rose tinted ideal of what family life could be, like a carrot on a stick hanging over us, taunting us with an unattainable perfection. We use it to beat ourselves up and prove the many ways we are not good enough mothers, but as a single mom it’s not just ideas of the perfect family we have to surrender but also the happy marriage.
I was six when I first started planning my wedding. Painstaking drawings of dresses with big poofy sleeves that rivalled the ‘80s fashion I was surrounded by. I cut out pictures of flowers and cakes, and of course the endless changes to the music list depending on what was topping the charts. And while letting go of the happy marriage ideal is heartbreakingly hard, for me it has been the key to finding something unexpected. Something true. Something unique to the craziness that is my family and can offer a chance for a life so much more beautiful than an imagined day dream that was never mine to begin with.
At the heart of what I feared I was losing was the connections between my children and I that build shared memories and create bonds that survive everything life could ever throw at them.
I was fearful that I wouldn’t be enough by myself to be the glue that would keep us all together. Opening your heart to love a child seems to expand you beyond what you thought you were capable of ever feeling. Then you find yourself about to have another and you wonder, will I be able to love them as much? Is there enough of me to go round? Soon enough you realize that yes, there is, there always is. You expand and grow and perhaps sometimes there isn’t enough time in the day to feel like you’ve connected with each of them in the way that you want, but your love will never be doubted. It is the safety net that children carry in their back pocket everywhere they go.
I was an only child who desperately wanted siblings. I grew up with a romanticized idea of big family life gleaned from the pages of old-fashioned books, like a young Dickensen character standing outside the big house looking in on the warm Christmas scene with longing. Those narratives had no time for the moments in between, the mortar between the bricks that enabled the family to stand tall and strong. I fell in love with the glimpses, thinking them out of reach and not realizing that I already had them.
This broken glass wasn’t what I wanted. It wasn’t what I signed up for or planned. It would take a brave person to intend to solo parent four children, and that person wasn’t me. But in seeing the separate shards of us I found a way to piece them back together. The Japanese art form kintsugi, of repairing broken pottery by filling the cracks with gold, has always spoken to me. Our gold was when we were together, sharing food, time and just being present with one another. It was the connection I was craving, between each child and myself, but also that I yearned to see between them.
As I swept up the shards I realized that a unit is not made by having a person in each designated role, it’s by having a trusted bond between everyone present, regardless of gender, age or responsibility. Families come in all shapes and sizes, and it’s not enough to feel that way about the families you meet if you don’t apply it to your own.
When night falls, the house stills, and the youngest two have run out of excuses to get out of bed, I find myself alone and whatever emotion arises I sigh into it and focus on the threads that tie each of us together, creating our own little family web that is strong, stable and renewed each day. It’s okay if there are fragile moments or even breaks, they just teach us how to rebuild and how to find each other after moments of feeling lost.
How do we find our own perfect? A way of seeing the moments amongst the friction of daily life that are so full of wide smiles and shared silliness that if we could just stand still and drink them in, doubts would vanish for long enough to see that everything was going to be okay.
So much of my journey with motherhood has been wrapped up in learning and relearning that I am enough. I know now that with all the mistakes I undoubtedly make and the moments of unspoken need I miss, my heart is theirs. Each one has a piece that they carry with them, that their smiles squeeze and will never ever run out of adoration for them. That love plus my intention to always try, always make the effort, is enough. And if the glass gets broken and my partner no longer stands by my side, that does not change how loved they are or the connections that we have. There will never be a perfect, but there will always be an us.
ADEOLA SHEEHY is an Irish/Nigerian Londoner now living in the New Forest, with her four home educated children. Writing from the crossroads of race, womanhood, and creativity she uses prose to tackle the questions her mind ponders most and poetry to express the feelings closest to her heart. Her experience as a yoga teacher and reiki master are at the root of her goal to encourage others through her words to live a fuller, more aligned life. She is a columnist for The Green Parent magazine and has her own publication on Medium.