I Am Held

This essay was published in the Summer 2020 issue of Parabola Magazine. Parabola closed its doors in 2025 after fifty years. I’m sharing some of my writing for them here on Substack.

I was awake until one in the morning last night, working and trying to work and failing to work. My two-year-old son woke me up at five, asking to watch TV. I let him. I lay in bed next to him while he watched Octonauts on the tablet I’d once thought I would never buy him, my head buzzing and aching, my eyelids scratching holes in my face. I couldn’t go back to sleep for fear he’d hurt himself; every time I close my eyes I see him choking on some small object I haven’t been vigilant enough to keep out of his reach, strangling on a power cord I haven’t properly secured.

At six-thirty we got up. I changed his nappy, changed his clothes, got his breakfast, and dressed and fed myself, then got us out the door so he could go to creche and I could go to work. Once all of this was done I was already tired, and I had yet to begin my day. This is a story most modern parents know well.

I have four jobs. I am also a single mother and an immigrant, estranged from my parents by my own choice, recovering from an abusive marriage. All these things make me tired on their own. All these things make me sad. I find I have very little emotional capacity left, and making a mistake at work or while cooking dinner can plunge me into a panic attack. Then I feel foolish and I berate myself for reacting so strongly to small problems. Where is my grace, my spirit, my wisdom in those moments? Why are small things now so frightening, when they’re no larger than they ever were?

My son asks for a hug; I give him one. The most hard-and-fast rule of parenting I have is that he always gets hugs when he wants them, no matter what. I breathe in the scent of his hair, that other mothers always asked to smell when he was a newborn. He asks for hugs a lot, but lately as soon as I wrap my arms around him he squeaks “I’m stuck!” and pulls away. I always let him go as soon as he asks; I also try to respect his boundaries more than my own parents could with me.

He asks to dance with me to the Sesame Street song “Sail on Fisherman.” I try never to say no to dancing, either. But so often in between hugs and dancing he is watching TV and I am desperately scrabbling after a moment with my own mind: looking at my phone, or knitting, or reading a book. Every second that’s happening I feel like a failure, but I cannot -- physically, mentally, emotionally cannot -- summon the strength to do anything else.

In my weaker moments (and it sometimes seems like these are all I have) I rage against these circumstances that I have largely brought on myself. I chose to leave my country. I chose to leave my parents. I chose to leave my husband. I chose a volatile career as a writer instead of, oh, say, a CPA or a plumber. I chose to have a baby with a man who became dangerous to us, and who has refused to see our child for a long time now. Still, he keeps us here; because of international child abduction law, I cannot move out of my adopted country if I want to bring our child with me. When I told him our marriage was over he threatened to have me deported and keep our baby here with him. A week later, news broke of the family separations at the US-Mexico border. I had nightmares all that first summer about babies in cages. I gave my grocery money to RAICES. Being forced apart from my child is my worst fear, but even though I love the country where I have to stay with him, life as an immigrant is often isolating and lonely, life as a single mother doubly so.

But I chose this. I got myself here. How dare I complain about it? How dare I write about it?

Another thing I thought I’d never do is lie down with him for an hour every night as he falls asleep. But a few months ago he started crying and crying if left to fall asleep alone, and I couldn’t bear it, couldn’t tough it out as a childless friend advised me to do. This was partly a selfish choice: I wanted him to fall asleep alone so I could have some precious time to myself, but lying with him, boring as I have to admit I find it, is better than the way my spine stacks up on itself like a Jenga tower if I have to listen to him cry, and not go to him.

I feel such shame for not focusing completely on my child in these moments when I am holding him, for letting my mind wander to other things. How many parents of grown children, who have slept through the night every night for years, warn the new ones to “cherish every moment” with their babies?

But the other day I had a thought about god. I was thinking about love and attachment, especially romantic attachment, the way my friends and myself spent our twenties so often staying with, or going back to, romantic partners who were unsafe or simply unkind. I know we longed for something from them that none of us have ever found in a fellow, fallible human being: not our friends, not the people we date, not our parents. I know that what I longed for, what I searched for so long in partners and friends and mentors all along the spectrum of kindness and cruelty, is a feeling of being completely held. Of knowing that I was safe.

We ought to experience this feeling as young children in our parents’ or caregivers’ arms, but as adults it is so much harder to find. No wonder we search for it in each other.

The only place I have ever found it is with the presence that might be called god. Sometimes, when I reach out in prayer or slip into meditation, or in certain unexpectedly transcendent moments of everyday life, I feel it. I let my soul lean back into a trust fall and something catches me. Holds me. I can let go of the heavy ache of anxiety and terror that I so often carry.

What an honor, what a gift: that for a few years as a parent you can provide that feeling for your small child.

They grow out of it soon, of course; or I should say, we grow out of it. We realize how fallible our parents are, and sometimes that they cannot be trusted at all. I have chosen estrangement from my own parents for the last seven years, and I know it is one of the healthiest choices I’ve ever made.

But the last time I leaned back and let god catch me, I thought (or the thought came to me, arrived): would it bother me, while being held like this, if I knew god’s mind was elsewhere? If god was holding me, comforting me, while also attending to other things?

The idea was absurd. In fact it would be a terrible thing to be the sole focus of god. I cannot imagine that any sane person would want god’s undivided attention.

But if some loving presence can hold me, let me rest in its arms, while it also attends to more important things: that seems like such a blessing. As Mike Doughty sings in “His Truth Is Marching On,” “Let me know your enormity and my tininess. Help me see your infinity and my finiteness.”

Oh, let me be insignificant, and held.

Maybe this is what my child wants as well.

I am comparing myself to god and that seems like sin indeed. But a parent is, for a few years, a god to their child. Of course this is a terrifying prospect, a mortifying responsibility and one in which it is impossible not to fail. I write for and work with teenagers, and I truly believe that much of the teenage behavior that so frustrates adults comes from the very natural sense of betrayal, in the teenage years, that follows the heartbreaking realization that our parents are not the gods we worshipped in young childhood. The gods are gone, and a pathetic old hypocrite or two are all that’s left in the ruined temple. Teenagers gradually realize -- especially now -- that they are inheriting a world already corrupted by we old gods, possibly beyond repair. Some, like Greta Thunberg and Emma Gonzalez, turn their anger into incandescent activism. Hopefully, in young adulthood, we confront and acknowledge our own fallibility, and in our different ways we can forgive our parents theirs. I know very well how different that forgiveness can look for different families; for me it looks like the boundary I finally grew up enough to make between my parents and myself. What it will look like for my son will be up to him. I know he will have much to forgive me for.

Coming back to god, in my own liminal, nondenominational, uncertain way, has felt a bit like forgiving a parent. And letting god hold me helps me see, sometimes, that what I do for my own child might, in its imperfect and incomplete way, be all he and I need from each other. That the flawed love I have to give him might truly be enough.

It is far easier for me to understand that perfection is an arrogant impossibility through the lens of my spiritual practice than through that of parenting. Especially as a single parent, I am always terrified of falling short of what my child needs. The truth is that I do fall short. But remembering god helps me remember that none of us do anything else.

Breathing in the scent of my child’s hair brings my body peace in a way meditation and mindfulness and yoga have never matched. No matter how quickly he breaks the hugs he asks for, that breath I take with his head under my chin steadies me. I find something like faith.

When I was pregnant I chose a mantra for birth that I found in Terry Pratchett’s Wintersmith. The witch protagonist speaks a powerful spell: “This I choose to do. Where this takes me, there I choose to go.” Whenever I remember it, even now, it gives me courage. I had no idea where becoming a mother would take me, that my marriage would end and I’d struggle as much as I have. But as bewildered as I sometimes feel, there is power in remembering that I chose this path, and I am walking it the best I can.

This present moment: I choose it. I am here, with my child, in this house, in this country, in this life. I am here, and I can believe that I am held.