Beautiful Chaos

Reflections From The Trenches of Motherhood

“The sunlight threatens to pour in, but the curtains are drawn at strange times. Beds unmade, hair tied up permanently, which becomes matted eventually. Clothes on day three, you don’t even put them away any more. There are pillows everywhere, things everywhere, like a tiny hoarder has come to stay.”

- Beautiful Chaos

I started reading Beautiful Chaos, Jessica Urlich’s tender collection of poems on motherhood. Well, not so much reading, as absorbing it in small bites, a page at a time, while contorting my body to feed a hungry baby, holding a chilled teething ring to tender gums, rocking endlessly, humming, humming. Life with a four-month-old is beautiful and hard.

It strikes me that I’ve been a Mother for precisely twenty-six years now. I was just nineteen, still a college student myself, when Cairan, a sweet toddler with a mess of blonde hair and cautious eyes, came into my life. The precariousness of his situation triggered something primal in me, I guess, and so when his biological Mother found herself back in jail yet again, I took him in. I’ll never forget the day I went to retrieve his possessions and opened up his Fisher Price toy box to find it filled with