I try to observe. I try to smile. Then there I am in the park smiling at strangers’ kids, at the way they put their feet over the jet of water and leap away, lashing themselves with spray. The child with the blue bucket on his head has a grandfather who wears a sleeveless t-shirt and has long muscles –years of labour on him. The grandfather’s knuckle raps at the blue bucket, and the grandfather smiles. I try to become inspired by everything I see, like they suggest, look more deeply, but my eyes twitch to my children constantly: there he is in a wet bathing suit on a slide; there he is sitting astride the green turtle that spouts water; there he is kicking water from the vertical jet of water; there he is with his burnt neck facing the sun. I chronicle their movements like I am a lifeguard and they are bobbing heads just above the surface. But here we are on dry land with the strangers and the bees. My mother’s anxiety the fabric of my undergarments, closest to me. How much of it is my own? Born of late nights and booze and terrible choices and men that held me too tightly or not at all. I can’t heap it all on her as she sits watching swans on Lake Ontario or cleans a fridge or waters balcony plants with long Latin names. We say, I’m all over the place, by way of an apology for entertaining the movements in our peripheral vision. We acknowledge all things as mothers, because we have to. And then our vision becomes surface, shallow, no time for depth because someone might drown or be stolen or stung by a bee. How absurd, those moments when I took a book, a good book, a literary book, to the park, to the splash pad and pretended to be in two places at once, the kingdom of my children, and the subway in New York City, for instance. I skitter between worlds constantly then apologize for my erraticism. Life makes a maniac out of us. Of mothers. When we speak to each other we speak in easy dialects of camp and rashes or lunches and teachers, the angst of our failings buried deep. Occasionally some of those mothers get drunk together and ‘bond’ which means they speak truthfully about the grief of being fractured, imperfect people who forever fail their children and their bosses and their husbands and their sisters. But when the wine wears off, there is more isolation. Because now you have admitted your humanness to each other, and there’s a great shared shame between you, like a night of passion fueled by drugs or infidelity. You don’t want to be reminded of your witness. You avoid her. To be a mother and a writer is the double blessing everyone moons over, it seems. And I can call myself double blessed, yes. But here I’ve inserted the necessary caveat so that this doesn’t seem the privileged whining that it undoubtedly is. I write, I mother, I observe, I am. These things all inlaid with my mental illness or mental health, depending on the day, the weather, the barometric pressure, my gut flora, the meds, our interaction, the workload, the wind speed, the season, the sunlight, the quality of the meditation, the time on the trail, the conversation with the husband, the sister, the best friend, the mother. Nothing is simple. Especially mothering. Especially writing. I’ve told the children one hour so I can write, and thought of buying an hourglass with real sand, delicate bobble. It could sit on the carpet outside the bedroom so my little guy could see how much time is left. But there’s something so fatalistic about that object. I remember being thrilled and appalled at its last grains tipping and tumbling down the glass chute to land on the peaked pile. Elation. Grief. This would be the hallmark of my lived experience. These extremes. Now already July and I haven’t written anything. The coins I want to stamp with poems are beginning to tarnish and I need a finer grit to polish them first, or do I. The letter to a Chicago friend, partially written, is under a file atop a passport application for the children. The emails are unanswered. Everything piles up like tiny grains tumbling down a glass chute. I watch with elation and grief.