Mothering

Jasper found this soldier on a fence yesterday while on a long walk. He brought him home and said, “He needs you to rescue him.”
The figurine is now sitting on my Anker Bluetooth speaker. Jasper cleverly remarked, “Ah, you’re his anchor.”
I think frequently about a line from the Gloria Anzaldua poem, “Letting Go,” in which she writes, “Nobody’s going to save you.”
I think about other writers who suggest that many of us save just as many others every day through subtle acts, sometimes great ones.
In spite of my profound sense of messiness, of near-drowning in the day-to-day, my son has a sense that I am capable of being an anchor for another.
Probably I have been his anchor these last decades. This gives meaning to days, weeks, even years during which I haven’t been able to understand the “why” of life.
Even wrecked, we matter.

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