To The World's Okayest Moms...

The love you feel for your own child is one so complete 
and all consuming 
that it can at once ground you and weigh you down, 
fill you up to spilling over,
bend you to the point at which you are positive that surely you will break. 

But there is nothing more whole and more perfectly imperfect than the love one feels for her child. 
It is lofty and heavy and knows no bounds or limits. It tells you simultaneously that as a mother you are everything and also you are no one. 
That you know best. 
That you know nothing at all. 
That you can have it all and do it all but never all at the same time. 

And in the end the three dishes you manage to wash and the single load of laundry you get in the dryer but never turned on in between twenty four hours of nursing, changing diapers, rocking, repeating....

nursing, changing diapers, rocking, repeating....

nursing, changing diapers, rocking, repeating....

nursing, changing diapers, rocking, repeating....

... is somehow both a monumental success and not good enough. 
Not ever good enough. 

But be still. 
Be easy. 
You can't measure up because this love is too big and too great. 
A love so colossal is in and of itself immeasurable and there is little room left for quantifying other, lesser things, like dirty dishes or spit up stained laundry. 
Because this love is blind enough to see it all. 
Ignorant enough to know it all. 
Numb enough to feel it all both moving through you and washing over you. 
It knows from exhaustion and thirst and hunger. 
It knows from deciding in the twenty minutes a day during which you have access to both your hands whether it's more important to shower or use the bathroom or finally turn on the dryer . 
It grows so heavy at times it can feel like a burden. 
How on earth did you go from being this watermelon-bellied princess who was concurrently the center of her world and the center of gravity to being consumed by a force that defies gravity altogether? 

But then he smiles and gazes in your eyes. 
And this time it's not a reflex. 
It is intentional. 
It is silent and it speaks volumes. 

You are mine, it says. 
You are my world, it says. 
You are trying and failing and trying again, 
it says 
and then...
in a wave of weightless flight as you are lifted up by this inconceivable energy to keep going, 
to do it all over again and again and again,
it whispers gently and softly and kindly: that is good enough. 
You are good enough.