God's Huntress

Sometimes I watch my children in the late afternoon, when the house has gone soft around the edges, and I think about the child I was.

They don’t know they are being watched.

They are barefoot. Someone is laughing in the next room. Someone is asking for a snack they have already been told they cannot have. There are shoes in the hallway and books left open and a glass of water abandoned on the stairs.

The whole house is alive with the careless evidence of children who believe they belong here.

And I let them.

I let them be loud.

I let them interrupt.

I let them come looking for me.

They do not know that there was once a little girl who learned to listen before she spoke.

They do not know that some children become quiet because quiet is safer.

They do not know what it means to watch the face of an adult before deciding whether it is a good moment to be hungry, or tired, or sad.

They do not know.

And I am grateful.

There are things I want my children never to know.

I want them to believe that home is the place you can wander into without knocking.

That if you are frightened in the night, someone will come.

That hunger means you ask for bread.

That sadness can simply be sadness, and does not require an explanation.

That you can make a mistake and still be held.

That you can be difficult.

That you can be ordinary.

That you can spend an entire afternoon doing almost nothing and still be loved when the sun goes down.

They assume these things.

They should.

Sometimes that is what breaks my heart.

They move through childhood with the enormous confidence of the loved.

They expect tomorrow.

They expect breakfast.

They expect me.

They expect forgiveness.

They expect that the people they love will still be there after an argument, after a slammed bedroom door, after tears, after somebody says something stupid and immediately regrets it.

They have no idea how extraordinary this is.

I watch them playing and think about all the things I once thought were normal that were not.

All the small ways a child can disappear while still sitting at the dinner table.

All the rooms inside a person that can go dark very quietly.

And then one of my children will run past me, laughing, carrying something ridiculous, and the spell breaks.

There they are.

Alive.

Safe.

Unaware.

Their childhood spreading out before them like a field.

And I realize that perhaps this is what I was grieving all those years.

Not the house.

Not the years themselves.

I was grieving the childhood that should have been mine.

The ordinary one.

The soft one.

The one where I could have spent a morning looking for shells or chasing a moth through the grass, never once wondering what waited behind the next door.

I cannot go back and give that girl her childhood.

But I can stand here now.

I can open the door.

I can make the food.

I can listen to the story that takes twelve minutes to tell.

I can sit beside the bed.

I can let them come find me.

And maybe this is one of the quiet mysteries of motherhood: sometimes you are given the chance to stand at the edge of something you were denied and watch your children walk freely into it.

You don’t follow them.

You don’t interrupt.

You simply watch them disappear into the tall grass of their own lives, laughing, calling to one another, utterly certain that the world is good.

And for a moment, I can believe it too.

Not because the world has become innocent.

But because, here, in this little house, around this little table, I have been given the chance to make one small corner of it so.

And the girl I was is still somewhere nearby.

She is watching.

She is quiet.

But she is not alone anymore.

B🤍