Sierra V. Fedorko

there are things I wasn’t prepared for when I became a mother.

how four years later I’d feel sad for my son who loved a beetle-bug he kept in a small pumpkin house or crawling cheerfully on his dinosaur shirt.

my son carried this bug so happily, so carefully,  but the beetle-bug would fall on accident, a few legs missing and then that would be the harsh end of that.

the sun shines down like a traitor while my son leans quietly on my shoulder, “I miss my little friend,” he says. I feel the fissure in his innocent heart. I wish he could have his beetle-bug back. I hate the way it went.

but most of all, most of all! I grieve for the things in this tough world he’s slowly finding out—

that beetle-bugs can’t live forever in cared-for pumpkin houses, that friends will go missing in terrible ways, and sometimes just because life happens.

I wasn’t prepared for the depth
of this, but I’m slowly finding out—

how to sit quiet in piercing sun while sadness settles deep in our bones, how to speak without pouring salt in our wounds of that happiness we got to hold awhile, and how to mend breaks in my son’s heart landing ten times their size in mine.

I’m not prepared, I’m not prepared! But I’ll learn what it takes, what it means, what it is to be a mother in this kind of world.

and at least for now, for today while you’re four, we can find our bearings, get our balance back, just by looking in our garden for other little beetle-bugs to enjoy that pumpkin house. 

-S.V.F., Beetle-Bug

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