The things we carry

At the end of the day, I turn the pockets of my jeans inside out and find many things.

These things are sometimes remarkable but usually not. I carry these things throughout the day, up and down the stairs of my house, in my car, around the city.

I marvel at how I’m able to fit so many things in my pockets. They bulge, stuffed and misshapen, cradling the little pieces of my life as a mother.

I’m sure my pockets resemble yours.

The things we carry are largely determined by the age of our children. When they’re infants, we carry pacifiers, extra wipes, teething rings. When they’re toddlers, we graduate to baggies of goldfish crackers, lollipops, small toys to entertain during a trip to the bank. Soon we carry racecars, rubber bands, plastic barrettes, the phone number of a new mom-friend whom we really need to call to set up a play-date.

We carry band-aids, chewing gum, fresh tissues, dirty tissues, safety pins, bobby pins, paperclips, retainers, tweezers. We carry antibacterial gel for dirty hands at the park, a rusty nail found in the grass that we don’t want a bare foot to step on, a button that needs to be sewn back onto a jacket. We carry a perfect tiny tooth that has just fallen out, and we carry a $1 bill so we don’t forget that the Tooth Fairy needs to make a visit tonight.

We carry these things out of necessity. We carry them because we are practical and prepared. We carry them, above all, because we love our children, and who knows when one of them will require tweezers or a paperclip?

As mothers, we carry ourselves with grace, a kind of dignity. Now and then we face moments of anger and frustration, when we’d like to fling the contents of our pockets at our children and tell them to carry the things themselves. But then we take a deep breath, bearing in mind that these days of crammed pockets won’t last forever. We won’t always need to carry these things. Before we know it, our pockets will be barren of the miniature burdens of motherhood, and we won’t know what to do with all that empty space. 

My thanks to Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, a remarkable book of fictional stories about the war in Vietnam, for inspiring this post.