Motherhood
“Open Your Hands, Here Is Some Light”
In the darkness of my depression, my daughter helps me navigate the shadows
Every evening when the sun starts to set, my daughter picks me a bouquet of light.
The front door of our house is glass-paned, so she crouches in front of it, where lines of sun are drifting across the wood floor. She pretends to scoop something up — the motion very much like picking a flower — and then runs to me with empty hands.
“Here is some light,” she says, matter-of-factly.
I am on the couch, often, when she makes her deliveries. I am on the couch, often, period. I am able, for the most part, to keep the worst symptoms of major depressive disorder away from my daughter, but she sees its more innocuous manifestations, even though she doesn’t yet know what they mean. Which is to say I knew that I had been unable to get off the couch for weeks, but I didn’t know that my daughter also knew until the day she patted the cushion next to me and said, “This is Mommy’s house.”
After she makes her delivery to the couch, she runs back to the door and crouches again, staring at the light and shadows shifting on the ground. Something catches her eye, and she reaches for it. This time, she holds the emptiness like a…
