Cut-outs of you

The Art of Motherhood: Madeline Donahue captures the ecstasy and agony of being a mom.

Title from The Cut's piece about Madeline Donahue's work on motherhood that includes the above piece and other amazing ones.

You are the fabric that makes your kids.

You are the sewing thread that dives into the cloth attached to the needle, just to emerge breathless into the other side. You never stop. Even when they cut the chord that builds you and them, you long for their fabric again.

You are the one who urges for your ancestor's threads and stories embroidered on your body. They are already fading in color, yellowed memories that insist on escaping through your fingers and eyes, through thin air. But the ones that remain, you gently cut, unwrinkle, and sew into the fabric of your children's stories.

You are the one who stitches in their cloth your ideas and dreams, ideals—your never-ending lines in a multitude of colors. You sew and stitch and build threads of what you would like them to be, what you would like to have been because you are mirror and origin.

You are the one who asks. Could it be that in your womb, they saw with your eyes and smelled with your nose? When you burned your finger on the pan, did it hurt them? When you read books, did the words get imprinted on the pages of their minds just as they stuck to yours?

You are the flesh and blood within, and suddenly you blossom. The womb is a home. Your flesh becomes their flesh, and your bones feed their bones with calcium. You are able to make eyes, mouth, nose, and air. You are able to get all your love and make it come out smiling with a runny nose, running through the corridors of a once empty and silent house.

You are the lines of your veins that paint their vein lines red and purple and blush their faces flooding into rosy cheeks. Your hair, your smile, your eyes, and your mannerisms. Your wishes. All out.

You are. But your children are then snips of who you were. They are parts of your whole, each in its own way. They cut out pieces of you that you didn't even know you had to give, and yet you remain whole. You remain standing because it is only at this snippet-moment that this feeling will exist.

You are, at that instant, all the substance and material they have to understand what they can and want to be and where they want to go. And that's why you allow them to cut you, take away your words, ideas, laughter, and dreams because, at the same time, what they take, they give back.

You are you. But now you are also them. Your smile grows with theirs, and your eyes languish with each word faltered by their little mouths. Their mistakes, trials, and errors. You've been through it all as if it were all you. And the clippings, ah, the clippings. The cut-outs of the fabric of who you were that they dearly took away and kept. The same fabric they will use for the patchwork quilt of their destinies.

You are an instant recollected from a lifetime. You framed that fragmented moment with your children. The moment that silently slips from your fingers as soon as you think about it. It is gone. The time when you could all stay together, cutting, snipping. Existing.

You'll keep this cut-out dress in a red velvet box, wrapped in a gold bow, and when you miss it, when they're grown up and gone and out of the house and living their lives, you'll look peek through the holes make the cutouts your binoculars to watch through tears of nostalgia all that you've given and got from your children.

You are them.