Toad

My child is sitting cross-legged on the floor reading to herself. Sometimes she is so full of need I push her to the floor. Only once I did that and I don’t even remember the moment right, but I was trying to wipe urine off my leg and she was naughty like a squirrel and jumping and singing and her head slammed into my chin, which hurt and even more than that, it pissed me off, because she’s my beautiful child, but in that button snap of a moment she was suddenly just one more person and I pushed her away in a way that felt to me like setting her down, but awkwardly, because of how she was also balancing her feet on my feet as I tried to pour out a bowl of pee from her little potty as a toothbrush dangled foaming from my mouth. Somewhere in the mess of that morning she’d become person enough to, in the space between us, create force of momentum, and then I did not set her down, but pushed her and she fell away from it against the wall and was crying because I, her mommy, pushed her. And I know this should be the poem about how I’m horrified at myself, the poem about what in ourselves we have to live with, but in that moment which followed two years of breastfeeding and baby-wearing and sixty-nine hours of natural childbirth and the hemorrhaging and the uncertain operation, after which I pumped every two hours, careful not to let the cord tangle in the IV. Even then when she cried and no matter what and no matter and no matter and no matter and no matter what, I held her all night if she cried so she would not ever know someday you’ll cry alone, but I held her and ached and leaked and bled too as long as it took. Of course there’ve been nights since but sometimes it feels as if I’ve never been asleep again, so when I say I pushed my two-year-old against a wall and I don’t remember it happening that way but it happened and I did and I’ve been wondering a long time now what the limit is and when I would find the end of myself, and that day, which was yesterday, was the end. And this day, when we played hide-and-seek with Daddy, and touched bugs, and read Frog and Toad Are Friends twice together before she read it to herself as I wrote this, this is the day that comes after.