How Strong is Your Back?

Photo by Volkan Olmez on Unsplash

“How strong is your back?” 

My mother asked me once. In the crawling darkness of the night, my newborn son wailing in my arms. I rose from the chair, squeezing the exhausted and frustrated tears back, ready to pace the floor, rocking, bouncing, swaying and shushing, holding my favorite life against my chest, arms wrapped just tight enough to leave him, to leave me, feeling secure. “How strong is my back?” I wondered. I would wonder for years to come. Could I do this all night? Could I walk you through this transition period? Beyond? Could I hold you, mimicking the rhythmic comfort in which you were designed? The comfort my womb, my body provided.

How strong is your back? I asked myself, half a question, half a challenge.

How strong are your hips? Are they strong enough to jut out, holding you as we rush through another day? Strong enough to swing as we sway through another night? Are they strong enough for their expansion, for their contractions? Strong enough to hold a womb, stretched and full? Strong enough to hold it empty and healing? 

And my arms? Can they lift you up? Can they set you down? Will they be strong enough to hold on tightly? Will they be strong enough to let you go?

How strong is your back, mama? 

Is it strong enough to hold us all upright as we grow together and apart? Strong enough to bend over the crib, patting and shushing? To bend without break. Without breaking.

Is it strong enough to balance it all? To hold the weight of a bleeding body, a whole separate being, often forgotten and foregone. The weight of heavy, bleeding, milk-laden breasts, my tenderness and discomfort giving way to your tender comforting? To hold the weight of thoughts, sadness, and joy all together in a body that is both broken and powerful? To hold the weight of generational trauma, resurfacing with that old familiar fear and anxiety? Is it strong enough to hold the weight of the word “mother?” To hold the weight of the world’s expectations? Is it strong enough to hold the weight of your own?

How strong is your back? Strong enough to hold all that?

Strong enough to shrug it off? 

To ask for help. To drop the weight. To hold the core of who you are as a person, to hold all your feminine strength without ego or fear, but love?

Is it strong enough to hold that love, to push it forward with strength and softness, knowing that those things are not in conflict, but in concert. To pull your head and heart upright as you ask for a bolster, a net, a brace.

To know that none of these things, these needs and desires, are your weaknesses, but the layers that build your enduring strength. They are the backbone to your motherhood, to your family. To their health, their growth, and their joy.

To your joy.

They are what sustains us long after the last infant cry fades, after the tears dry and scratch into our skin, after the last temper tantrum simmers and cools.

How strong is your back? 

As strong as it needs to be.

As strong as that.