03 Sep I’ll Meet You There
There is something about finding a book you once read to your children over and over again. You remember the illustrations before you open it. You can almost feel the weight of a small body beside you.
I was sorting through old books recently when I found our well-worn copy of The Runaway Bunny. The faded blue cover, the tall green grasses bending across it, a white baby bunny and his mother tucked among them. I must have read it to the girls hundreds of times.
The story is simple. A little bunny tells his mother all the ways he might run away from her. He’ll become a fish in a trout stream, a rock on a mountain, a crocus in a hidden garden. Each time, his mother tells him what she will become so she can find him. A fisherman. A mountain climber. A gardener.
When the girls were small, I thought of it mostly as a story about the constancy of a mother’s love. I still do. But flipping through the pages now, I saw something I couldn’t have seen then.
It is also a story about how often motherhood asks us to change shape.
There are so many things I’m no longer needed for. Tying shoes. Buckling car seats. Cutting food into tiny bites. Washing hair. Reaching things on high shelves.
And somehow, new jobs keep appearing. Keeper of the favorite snacks. Receiver of memes. Counter of how long a handstand is held. Driving coach in the passenger seat. Hairstylist for something they saw on a reel. Co-investigator in whatever Netflix documentary we’re trying to solve. Someone to float around the pool with in the summer sun.
The bunny keeps imagining who he might become.
And his mother keeps answering, in one form after another: I will become what is needed to meet you there.
Perhaps this is part of what it means to raise children over a lifetime. We spend years helping them become more and more themselves, while continually discovering what they need from us along the way.
And all the while, they are making something new of us, too.