BAM! Sneakers to skull. Mad giggles. WAKE UP, MOMMY!
This is our game. I pretend to sleep in the base of the slide, and he crashes me awake. Again and again, world without end. Midge sleeps in her stroller a few feet away, swaddled in a soiled blanket, where milk and pee have dampened and dried. Iris, bored of sick Mommy, plays on swings with a girl at the very edge of her boundary. She makes small talk with the kid’s grandfather. I peek my head out, force a smile and wave so he knows I am present and that Iris is not one of those abandoned kids at playgrounds who makes loving caretakers uncomfortable with her absent guardian and desperate appetite for attention. I tuck my head back into the crook of the slide.
BAM! Sneakers to skull. Mad giggles. WAKE UP, MOMMY!
Oh, how we laugh. I swoon, not with love for my curly-haired boy, but with gripping nausea, yellow spots dancing in front of my eyes. My peripheral vision reverberates, wavy like air in front of a space heater. I strain to focus, to glance at the stroller and listen for Midge. I hear only Henry’s feet clanging up the metal stairs, his breath heavy with laughter. Tree branches sway through my circle of sky. The air is wet and warm.
BAM! Sneakers to skull. Mad giggles. WAKE UP, MOMMY!
We four stay locked in this for some time. The rhythm of it – the anticipation of pain, the pain, the release, the rushing nausea – reminds me oddly of childbirth. We’ve been here before. Sometimes I count in between Henry’s crash landings. Sometimes I let my head loll with the trees. Sometimes I memorize the grain of the plastic. These generous moments between.
BAM! Sneakers to skull. Mad giggles. WAKE UP, MOMMY!
This should be torture, but it is unexpectedly perfect. My babies and I locked in the tawny gauze of a migraine, its arresting ability to contort time. In this moment that is an hour that is a decade that is prayer, I know what they each need. I am here. I am enough. I know who each of them is, and I can reach them all. I wrap my arms around this. The lip of hard plastic cools my cheek. In seconds, tiny sneakers will slam into my skull, joyfully. All I have to do is wait.