Ten years of motherhood

Text/Meiya

After writing this title, I was also shocked, ten years is really a word with its own sense of story, and it has been given the qualification of looking back and vicissitudes. Therefore, the decade can directly refer to an era, so Su Qing wrote "Ten Years of Marriage", and the title of the book is full of shocking tension.

I wanted to write this yesterday when I realized that it was Mother's Day, and my two children flew back to Hong Kong to go to school the day before, leaving me alone, a large chunk of time and a chunk of thoughts intertwined, and I wanted to say something.

This time they came back for an early summer vacation, from the perspective of adults, the whole process is not very pleasant, two months were isolated for more than a month, the rest of the time in the gap of sealing and control to find fun, for example, at home loops, fishing in the community river, in the nucleic acid testing square you chase me.

When my sister was in the centralized isolation point in Shanghai, she had a PTSD for the nasal swab, and after I picked them up, the hotel I stayed in was suddenly sealed, and I had to do a nasal swab every day, and there was no specific time to unseal.

So her sister cried every day when she did nucleic acid, and one night she secretly asked her brother: When praying to the Father, do you want to say it out loud or meditate in your heart?

The brother said: It should be said.

One dared to ask, one dared to answer, so I heard my sister's first prayer in life: I hope that tomorrow the hotel will be unsealed, and there will be no more nucleic acid testing.

I've always described my sister as a 7-year-old with a 3-year-old IQ because she grew up in the palm of her hand, nursing and carefree, and the world didn't have the look she needed to see and the nightmare of worry.

But she has it now.

I couldn't do anything but hug her and comfort her over and over again: there are some things Mommy can't do.

If there is any new experience in motherhood in recent years, it is guilt. Abstractly, I took them to a world of predictable rivers and rivers. Specifically, it is the helplessness of the long-term separation between the two places under the epidemic situation, and the long and repeated isolation.

Ten years ago I gave birth to my brother, and more than a year later I gave birth to my sister, and I didn't expect it at all, and the future at that time was hopeful, and they were also the hope of my new life, and the hope was twofold.

I still remember that I had to sit on a small stool and rest my stomach on my knees for eight months to write my master's thesis; I also remember that after I gave birth to my sister and put her to sleep, I got up to write the manuscript of my first book and waited for the next feeding.

Compared with hope and hope, hard work is really nothing.

At that time, I thought that the world was vast and vigorous, and if I wanted to say that I was figurative, I was probably standing on the philosopher's path on the north bank of the Neckar River in Heidelberg, overlooking the university town of Heidelberg surrounded by smoke and the sun at the bottom of the mountain.

There is truth to guide, there are fresh young people looking up, there is a bright and clear silence and the bells of the church. I think it's good for kids to come here.

And now the world is a 10-square-meter room, and the area that is still collapsing, I am afraid that the children will stand on the collapsed piece, and I will not be able to protect them.

Now I often think of interviewing Cai Lan and asking him why a man as traditional as he chooses Dink, he said: What is the purpose of bringing children into this world? The world is getting worse and worse, and you can see that the fish in the sea are not fresh.

The only fluke is that they are all 5 years old, old enough to be vaccinated, and have a certain degree of resistance; fortunately, they are not yet adolescence, not enough to appreciate the dangers of the world, and the threshold of happiness is very low.

From the child's point of view, this summer vacation is still very enjoyable, you can play cards and games with your parents, you can go to the community park every day to play recreational facilities, you can go to the countryside without wearing a mask to climb trees.

Take them to the country forest farm to play, it is the highlight of the holiday, there is a "tropical rainforest" (small forest), there are fish ponds that can be floated, chickens, ducks and geese that can be chased, lambs that can be petted, three-wheeled electric vehicles that can bump all the way, and ice cream can be bought in the county town.

In the past 10 years, unmarried girlfriends have often asked me curiously what it is like to have children, and my answer outline has never changed: I regret having children, but I do not regret having them both.

The regret part is about the squeeze of personal space, the superiority of the upper echelons of the mother's office, and the endless responsibility. During the six months I lived alone in Beijing, I sometimes secretly cheered for my freedom.

These are all based on women's own and social structures, and now they may have to add environmental factors, regretting that they have brought them to this less optimistic world.

The place of no regret is complex, and stripping away those intimate experiences that are visible to the naked eye is not entirely positive for pleasure, and sometimes even coincides with the cause of regret. For example, when you have been a mother for ten years, and then recall the time when you sat on the toilet in the middle of the night and slept and fed, there will be a trace of nostalgia.

You don't want to go through it again, but you miss it.

You will look at the half-grown child in front of you who can already refute his mouth, and ask yourself in a trance: How did it grow so big?

Because what you don't want to experience is the painful moment of loneliness, and what you miss is the origin of this specific person in front of you.

It is precisely through suffering that you have obtained a living person and overlapping life time, which is a real existence that cannot be stripped from the action of having children and the academic term "reproduction", let alone summarized by such a thin word as "regret".

The Creator is exquisite, when your hormones have receded, your child has gone from an intruder to air, food, sleep, you will never say, I regret breathing air.

Children are a considerable and continuous gain, they are also different from material possessions, their life cycle does not wither in your life cycle, so they can give you the illusion of eternity and stability.

But it is inevitable that I will not be able to say these things, because these realizations are all glued and extracted from the fragmented details of the long river of time, but to any onlooker, it is only the appearance of fragmentation itself, which is prohibitive.

Let's talk about examples.

That day we did the full nucleic acid out, the wind blew, they ran all over the place, I just think life is difficult. The sister suddenly pointed to the ground and said, Mommy, you see, pink leaves, so beautiful.

As soon as I looked up, I saw the fallen leaves of the camphor trees on the ground swirling in the wind, like gentle ripples of red scales, and they rushed to call "Mommy" to express their surprise and joy.

I think of Zhang Ailing writing About Hu Lancheng: "He sat alone on the sofa, the room had the tranquility of gold dust and gold sand buried deeply, the wind and rain outside, and the mountains were all over today."

Probably the way I looked at them at that time.

I came back and looked up curiously, it turned out that the camphor tree was evergreen in all seasons, other trees fell leaves in autumn, it was in the spring, other leaves were yellow, but it was red.

After knowing this little knowledge, I was happy for a long time, and I felt that there was still a sense of interest in the horns, which could be used as sandbags for ostriches.

It was also in their bright moments that I was able to perceive the order of nature and the normality of the world. Without them, the world would be more bitter.

In my tenth year as a mother, I regretted having children, but I was glad I had them.

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