He had held his hand out to me, an expression of disbelief on his face. In his loosely clenched fingers I could see the flap of the butterfly’s wings. “No way,” I said. “You caught it??”
“Yup,” he said, and then looked from his hand to me again. “Now what?”
“Well, now you let it go,” I said, because it was the only thing we could do. So we let it go, and it flew away, and Jack squealed, and we headed back towards the white dot that was home.
Maybe, if we are lucky, we catch something and we draw it close to us, marvel at its beauty and marvel even more at the gift that is us holding it.
And I tell Gabby how maybe it is always like that butterfly. Maybe, if we are lucky, we catch something and we draw it close to us, marvel at its beauty and marvel even more at the gift that is us holding it. But we can’t hold it forever, and not just because it would be awkward for both us and the butterfly if we did, but because in doing so eventually we would destroy the very thing that made the moment beautiful in the first place: its inevitable ending.
Gabby listens intently, her breath softening. “Also,” she says, “if your hands were always full of butterfly you wouldn’t be able to hold anything else.”
And that’s kind of everything, isn’t it?
It’s the teeth, pushing up and into my baby’s mouth until they come out again and into my box. It’s me giving my mother the box in the first place only to have the box then given back to me when she died. It’s her, here and then not. It’s having babies and then not having babies anymore but having these children, these people who can stand on their own, feet slightly spread and fingers holding a bat in my kitchen, lit like flames with anger that is caught, held, and then released later when she surrenders into my arms. It’s my own anger at my mother, long since burned through into peace and even something that looks a lot like love.
It’s at its most basic just the ebb and flow of Gabby’s soft breath, the inhale of all the things we pull in and hold close flowing into the exhale of all the things we have to release and set free.
And it’s what came not that long after Gabby’s spaghetti sauced hand prints on my window, shortly after my mother died, when Gabby was still small enough to fold into my lap on the couch. We had been sitting, entwined, until she had shifted somehow in my arms just right and for a second it was there, the smell of my mother’s perfume, clear as day and unmistakably hers. “My mother is here,” I had said before I even knew what I was saying, and Gabby had leapt up from where she was sitting in my lap and ran to the door, threw it open. “Come in, come in, come in!” she had yelled, joyous. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
It was the kind of moment you wanted to hold onto for a little while, sad but also beautiful, and I was glad by then that I had let go enough of the butterfly to have some space inside my heart for it.
Liz is a writer, blogger, teller of stories, believer in truth, and mama to four. She shares her stories on lizpetrone.com and all over the Internet, and recently finished a sloppy first draft of her first book. She can also be found on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
