Toad | The Poetry Foundation

My child is sitting cross-legged on the floor reading to herself.

Sometimes she is so full of need I push her to the floor.

Only once I did that and I don’t even remember the moment

right, but I was trying to wipe urine off my leg and she was

naughty like a squirrel and jumping and singing and her head

slammed into my chin, which hurt and even more than that,

it pissed me off, because she’s my beautiful child, but in that

button snap of a moment she was suddenly just one more person

and I pushed her away in a way that felt to me like setting her

down, but awkwardly, because of how she was also balancing

her feet on my feet as I tried to pour out a bowl of pee

from her little potty as a toothbrush dangled foaming

from my mouth. Somewhere in the mess of that morning

she’d become person enough to, in the space between us,

create force of momentum, and then I did not set her down,

but pushed her and she fell away from it against the wall

and was crying because I, her mommy, pushed her. And I know

this should be the poem about how I’m horrified at myself,

the poem about what in ourselves we have to live with,

but in that moment which followed two years of breastfeeding

and baby-wearing and sixty-nine hours of natural childbirth

and the hemorrhaging and the uncertain operation, after which

I pumped every two hours, careful not to let the cord tangle

in the IV. Even then when she cried and no matter what

and no matter and no matter and no matter and no matter what,

I held her all night if she cried so she would not ever know

someday you’ll cry alone, but I held her and ached and leaked

and bled too as long as it took. Of course there’ve been nights

since but sometimes it feels as if I’ve never been asleep again,

so when I say I pushed my two-year-old against a wall and I don’t

remember it happening that way but it happened and I did

and I’ve been wondering a long time now what the limit is

and when I would find the end of myself, and that day, which

was yesterday, was the end. And this day, when we played

hide-and-seek with Daddy, and touched bugs, and read

Frog and Toad Are Friends twice together before she read it

to herself as I wrote this, this is the day that comes after.