Plain Old Mom

The mystery of life is that the beautiful and the broken are inseparable. Together they come.

Brown, gray, white-ish, rough, smooth, round, flat…

I struggle to think of any more adjectives for what has been placed in the middle of my open palm that I haven’t already used. My daughter looks at me expectantly.

“Uhm—oh, look!” I point out, relieved to have found something distinct about the new rock she’s found. “There’s a little stripe there.”

My daughter is pleased with my assessment—"It’s so pretty,” she concurs— and takes the rock from my hand and adds it to her growing pile next to me. She meanders back to the playground and squats down under the slide to look for more.

We continue this routine for awhile. She chooses a rock from the gravel covering the playground and brings it to me where I evaluate it. She gives her approval and adds it to her collection. We do this until there is a pile of pebbles grouped together on the ground along the curb.

At a passing glance, the rocks that make the bed of the playground seem like a jumbled pile of gray gravel. Nothing too outstanding. The gravel exists to soften falls, to dump out of shoes for the hundredth time, to throw in the air, and to be a steady place to land.

But when picked up one by one, and when a toddler looks expectedly at you, waiting for you to comment on them, they begin to transform. The shape of a nondescript little rock can look like a magic crystal or a bird’s egg or a snake’s fang. It turns into the makings of make-believe food and the wall of a pretend home. With a little imagination, the ordinariness of the rock changes into something extraordinary.

As I sit and wait for the next rock, I pick up her yellow plastic shovel and start mindlessly digging into the gravel.

This morning I saw images of red balloons tied to hulking piles of wreckage, each balloon representing a child who lost their life in the Turkey/Syria earthquakes. I saw teddy bears placed on the ground in Belgium, each stuffed animal symbolizing a child who has been missing since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine one year ago. I watch a video of a father scaling the wall of his daughter’s high school during one of many chemical attacks against school girls in Iran. And I think of all the smaller heartbreaks that have occurred closer to home.

I look at my daughter digging around in the rocks. She’s humming to herself.

I push the shovel in deep, tilling the playground’s rocks and sand, turning the dirt over and over, and picking out the interesting pebbles and sticks. And each drag of the shovel, each touch of my hand to the earth, turns into a prayer.

How can life be so hard and so beautiful at the same time?

How do I parent when life seems so fragile?

How am I supposed to hold it all?

We’re back at the same park again the next day, this time with a neighbor friend.

After growing bored of playing with chalk and begging for more pretzels, the two girls lose themselves in the world of pretend play, weaving in and out of the swings and monkey bars.

They buzz around, chattering back and forth, giving each other commands to whatever roles they’re acting out. My head is bent over my phone, tapping and scrolling until I hear one of them chirp: “We’re the plain old moms!” and it snaps up. 

“Plain old moms?” I repeat, laughing. “Who’s that?”

“Just us,” the oldest explains to me, clearly annoyed I interrupted their playing. She shakes a strand of hair out of her eyes with all the sophistication of a newly-minted five-year-old.

“We’re playing ‘Plain Old Moms.’ ‘Plain. Old. Moms,”’ she repeats, one hand chopping the air as she stresses each word.

I want to ask some follow-up questions, like what exactly is a plain old mom and what does she do? And why is that a fun thing to play?

And what I really want to ask is: is that…me? Am I a plain old mom? But the way she said the words implies that it was clear what they were playing and that I was the one who was slow on the uptake, so I keep my questions to myself.

I watch as they resume playing. The neighbor girl picks up leaves and rocks and lays them on the seat of the teeter-totter. She calls out directions for my daughter to pick up sticks for the spoons and grass for the pretend soup they’re making.

My daughter is near the monkey bars, cradling her yellow plastic shovel, and patting the handle to her chest. She shushes the shovel, as one would shush an infant, and slowly crouches down to hunt for some grass with her free hand. When she finds a clump, she walks back to the teeter-totter to add to their soup.

“Be careful,” the neighbor girl warns. “The soup is hot.” She’s looking directly at me with a stick pointed toward my face and I guess I’ve been invited back into their scenario. “Thanks,” I say and pretend to taste the soup.

That night, I crawl into bed next to my daughter. The sound machine is on, and the night light is positioned just right so no frightening shadows are cast along the walls.

I pull her blanket up to her chin and she shimmies down into bed, clutching her beat-up crocheted rabbit she has had since she was born.

I kiss her forehead and tell her good night. After the first earthquake hit in the early hours of the morning, I started reminding her to call out to me if she needed me.

I get up to leave the bed and she sleepily slurs “callmeifyouneedme,” mimicking my cadence. 

And I turn around at the doorway. Yes. Anytime. Call me if you need me. I love you. Sleep well. Good night.

I read somewhere once that moms are like the atmosphere. Like the air around us, they’re not always noticeable, but they’re there, holding up the sky like a protective blanket over their children.

I think about that image as I fish rocks out of my daughter’s jacket now that she’s sound asleep in her room, of moms as the atmosphere and all the important work they do, protecting and shielding, making life possible each day,

I know the image is meant to honor the mothers of the world, but it’s a tall order, being compared to earth’s atmosphere, especially with all the heartache happening just below the clouds.

No wonder the load feels so heavy.

I hang up my daughter’s jacket and line up the rocks in a row across the entryway bench, knowing she saw something special in each of these.

No matter how much I long to shield my daughter from the world’s bitterness, the mystery of life is that the beautiful and the broken are inseparable. Together they come.

No, I’m not the atmosphere. I cannot hold up the stars and the moon. I cannot protect her from every ache and pain. I cannot carry the weight of the world. But I would gladly accept the title of Plain Old Mom—the soup maker mom, the baby shusher mom, the call-me-if-you-need-me mom.

And I know I’m backed by countless other Plain Old Moms too, who are navigating their families through life’s upsets, taking unsure step after unsure step, palms laced together in late-night prayers, pleadings, hopes, and dreams.

To receive this title, we know our own stories don’t always have to be hemmed in between inspiration and tragedy (although many of us carry both). Instead, our Plain Old Mom stories can be found wiping noses and bottoms and countertops, sucking sauce off of pieces of chicken, and blowing on the rice.

These stories can be found opening our home to a weary friend, pulling up an extra chair or two to the dining room table for unexpected guests, and doubling meals to drop off at neighbors’ doorsteps.

May we accept the Plain Old Mom award with honor, knowing that as we spill out our lives for our loved ones and serve God in the tasks of everyday life, we are pushing back the forces of darkness.

These small measures may seem plain and old but are anything but.

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This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to view the next post in the series "Acceptance Speech".