The Last Five Years as a Mom: Carrying it with both hands.

“I'll see you at 2:25, Mom.”

Hero's face is wet with tears, his shoulders pushed down by the dinosaur backpack that seems as large as a turtle shell. It's got a change of clothes, water bottle, lunch bag, his teacher's folder for take-home work. I hope it's not too heavy.

He kisses his hand at me till he's out of sight, walking with his dad to kindergarten.

I close the door and move slowly toward my workday, upstairs to my attic office. It is 7:38 a.m., an hour earlier than preschool, and after the late nights and early mornings of this past summer, this whole public school thing is taking some getting used to for the whole family.

How is it different than preschool, you ask? The biggest change for me is our shifting roles. In this past year, I've gone from making every snack, holding every hand, buckling every car seat for the 40-minute commute to the Waldorf co-op preschool I had picked, hand-picked. I managed the schedule, the feeding, so much of it, because my husband had a 50-hour work week job, and I was an artist mama.

We are both artists, culinary and theatrical, and this kindergarten school year—our first, preschool shouldn't count really—our roles are much more equal.

We've pinched pennies, foregone family vacations and some essentials, but Christian has lit up inside with his push to move his career to cooking classes, catering, and private chef gigs, out of the restaurant grind. I'm still up with Hero at night and in the early morning, but I wouldn't have that any other way. I am still the night mama. A soothing song and a cuddle, a hand held in the dark on the way to the potty.

Two weeks before this kindergarten morning goodbye, I had surgery to remove a large cyst from my left wrist.

“I made the appointment. The insurance hasn't gotten back to me yet, but it's going to be thousands of dollars.”

Christian is folding laundry, and I stand in our bedroom doorway, shifting from foot to foot, unable to stay still.

“Should I keep the appointment or should I cancel?”

“Babe, it's been weighing you down for years… here.”

My Sweetie the Chef puts his hand on my heart.

“You should do it.”

Hero and I at 9 months, around the time the cyst appeared.

A ganglion cyst, I'm told, can come from overuse, a little bubble of fluid rising beneath the skin. Mine rose up somewhere in the postpartum blur of 2021 or 2022. I don't really remember when it first appeared, but lifting my new baby, diapering him, being the mommy on call, the night mama, all that plus the added rush of some heavy-duty new anxiety—it did a number on my joints in their fourth decade. Instead of lifting a car over my head like Wonder Woman, I heaved stroller, child, and backpack up to our third-floor walk-up multiple times a day. These are all the normal things mothers do, again and over again.

By the time my 40th birthday had come and gone, I had my lump.

“Mama, you won't be able to give me fruppies? For how long?”

Fruppies are a joke, and we dissolve into laughter. My 45-pound son and I call them “front uppies”: I hold him in my arms, our hearts pressed together while his long legs dangle down.

“Mama will have the surgery to take away my lump, and then it is two weeks where I can't lift anything over five pounds with that hand.”

On the day of the surgery, Doctor Pang is wry as he makes a dotted circle with a purple marker around my cyst.

“Well, that's hard to miss.”

I’m uncomfortable with having a surgery that is mainly cosmetic. Yes, the cyst aches a little, but really, it's about what I see when I look down at my two hands, and in the mirror. I've yet to meet this version of myself: the person who invests in my appearance.

Now that I'm in my 40s, I'm often surprised at the changes in the mirror, after two decades of the same old me, give or take five pounds or bangs. Spending the money so I can feel better about my most common view, that of my hands, it does feel selfish.

But I listen to Christian. And to my heart. It’s true, there has been a weight under the bracelets I wear to disguise the growth. It is the weight of dissolving into motherhood and sinking heavily to the bottom, saying, “No, I don't matter. Everything is for you.” Even as I write this, I am afraid that someone reading it will question my love and devotion for my small son, that they would think I was blaming him for my lump.

I'm not.

But my hands got tired. Losing the lump, I let go of that part of me that says, “Yes, I will carry your burden, even though my own body is screaming for rest.”

It is time.

Those two weeks when I couldn't pick up my son and carry him downstairs to breakfast, he was so kind to me. He held my hand, reminded me to rest.

I couldn't carry him.

So, in his five-year-old way, he helped carry me.

“Why won't you walk me to school today, Mama?”

“Your dad and I have a plan, and it's a good one.”

It involves meditation and silence in the gym for me between work hours. And it gives Christian the incredible wealth of quality time he craves, walking to and from school after years of working in a kitchen with an iron schedule. It is a plan for balance that shifts, changes, and supports the load that is too much for one person to carry.

Letting that weight go gave us the space to find a new way, a new way forward. Five years carrying him. The baby, the stroller, the backpack up three flights of stairs. The nighttime trips to the potty. His hand in mine. His whole 45-pound body pressed against my heart for fruppies.

And now he carries his dinosaur backpack, his shoulders straight beneath it.

His dad walks beside him, ready to give support.

I stand at the door and say goodbye.

This may be incredibly common for parents, but it's new to me. You can read about it. You can hear about it. But when it happens, it feels so bright, so fresh and newborn, wilder than I could have ever imagined.Five years as a mom, five years carrying it with my two hands.

And now, sometimes, my hands can be empty.

Before and a week after the surgery.