Anna Castenada Rojas

“Ma,” I’m screaming into the phone with the wind still blowing, Brooklyn never wants to loosen its grip on winter. But the wind wants to go. After all, there’s a bunny here! A sure sign of spring. 

“What’s wrong?” My mother is on the other side of the country, chomping a bagel out on her balcony. She’s in curlers and a nightgown. I know this because even though I’m in Park Slope and she’s in Palo Alto where it’s three hours earlier, my mother has eaten a bagel in her nightgown and curlers every morning for the past forty-three years. 

“Ma, you’re not gonna believe this! I’m chasing a bunny through Prospect Park!”

“You’re chasing a what?” I can hear the crumbs spray off my mother’s lips as she reaches for her mug of milky coffee.

“A bunny, ma, a bunny.”

“What the hell are you talking about? There are no bunnies in Brooklyn.” 

I don’t know why my mother isn’t sitting on the boardwalk in Brighton Beach right now. She’s not the California type. She’s the Mumu on the boardwalk judging people as they walk by type. I mean, she’s yelling, YELLING AT ME, about this bunny. Arguing, really. And you can tell my family is from Brooklyn because I’m arguing right back. 

“Ma, how the hell do you know that there are no bunnies in Brooklyn? Are you here right now? Also, did you know that Coney Island was full of bunnies before it became Coney Island? It was called Rabbit Island before it was called Coney Island!”

My mother takes a deep sip of coffee before she says, “Are you in Coney Island right now or Prospect Park?”

“Prospect Park, by Ninth Street,” the bunny crosses the bike path, but I follow.

“Well, you should be at freaking Bellevue in Manhattan because you’re crazy. That’s not a bunny.”

The argument with my mother has not slowed me down. In fact, the angrier she makes me – insisting that this is not a bunny when she is in California, and I am following a bunny – gives me speed. I stay on the phone to argue and simultaneously chase the bunny. I’m not sure what I’ll do if I reach the bunny. It’s not like I’ll pick it up. I think I’m wondering that if I follow it into its home there is a possibility there will be more bunnies. Then I can snap a picture, post it on Instagram and caption it “First signs of Spring in Brooklyn!” Maybe the photo will go viral. Maybe I’ll be on the news. Maybe I’ll make a YouTube channel called “Brooklyn Bunnies” where I discover a new part of this bunny world every day. Then I’ll have tons of followers and be able to pay my bills, and I won’t have to worry so much about the cost of food, if I should sell my soul for a celery juice, or if I can find a brand-new pair of sneakers at a discounted price for my smallest child who’s growing at the speed of light. All of this goes through my head as I yell at my mother who’s eating a bagel on her balcony, and I chase this little animal into the forest.

“Ma, when I finally snap a picture of this thing, you’re going to be in shock. I mean, real shock. Ugh, hang on, I have to climb this fence.”

“Have you seen the news? Terrible, just terrible.” My mother has always had a real knack for changing the subject right at the point when I might win the argument. I put the phone on speaker and hook it into one of my bra straps under my sweater as I climb a fence by the far end of the lawn. 

“I haven’t seen or heard the news and I’d like to keep it that way,” I scream this into my chest as I jump down into what looks like an ivy forest just off the path. “I’m done watching the news, it’s making me really crazy and anxious.”

“Well dear, yes, you’re chasing an imaginary bunny into the woods. Aren’t you supposed to be working today?”

I snatch the phone from my bra strap, scratching my neck as I violently pull it out of my sweater. “Ma,” I grit my teeth, “the bunny is NOT imaginary. It’s right here, I just can’t get a picture of it because it keeps moving, oh but when I do…” Before I can finish my sentence, the bunny stops. “Ma, shhhh, hold on, it stopped.” As it freezes, I edge closer. It ruffles the ivy and turns to face me.

“Well, what is it?” My mother has a piece of bagel in her cheek that she hasn’t chewed yet. I can hear it there collecting saliva. She, too, is quiet and unmoving on the phone waiting to see who’s right. Who won the argument this time?

“Oh, wow, well, ok, eeewwww,” I am turning around as fast as I can, running in the other direction, hands shaking, shoving my phone back into my bra, leaping over the fence, taking the phone out again, and bounding across the big lawn at ninth street.

“What, what? What was it?” My mother shouts through the phone.

“I’m not telling you,” I’m still running.

“Now you have to tell me. I told you it wasn’t a G-ddamn bunny! What are you, nuts? What was it a squirrel? A bird? Chipmunk?”

“No, Ma, no.” I really don’t want to tell my mother what I have been maniacally chasing for the past fifteen minutes, but I know that in a real Brooklyn argument, you can’t hide the facts. 

“Come on, out with it! What have you been chasing?”

“A rat, ma, a freaking, disgusting, dirty rat, ok?!?” I wait for the cackle of laughter to come, and when it does, I laugh a little too.

“Do me a favor,” my mother is howling now, “if you’re off from work today go get your freaking eyes checked so that you stop seeing Easter Bunnies running around Park Slope.”

“Yeah, ok, Ma.”

“Now have a great day, dear. I love you! I’ve got to finish reading the Times before my ZOOM dance class.”

“Alright, Ma.”

“I can’t believe you just chased a rat through the park. I can’t wait to tell my friends at lunch today!” My mother is still giggling when she hangs up. 

If I really examine this experience, it’s that my heart has been chasing spring before spring has been ready to bloom. The winter was hard this year, and I can’t wait for the daffodils to begin making their entrances around the neighborhood. When will the front stoops of brownstones start showing their pink and blue perennials, their yellow tulips, their purple and white hyacinths? And because I can’t wait for the first bursts of color, those initial signs of hope and life, and the natural progression of things, I force it. Spring in Brooklyn, spring in Park Slope, cannot be forced. Instead, it must unfold, and we must allow it to. The cafes and restaurants up and down Fifth Avenue must set up their outdoor dining when the weather tells them it’s time. Little children exchange their heavy coats for sweatshirts and lighter activewear as the robins begin to appear. The green markets replaces apples and squash for strawberries, rhubarb, and asparagus. Then, and only then, is it spring. Anything else would be like screaming on the phone with your mother while chasing a rat through Prospect Park because you thought it was a bunny. And that would be crazy, right? I mean, who does that? 

I first meet the Anna Carapetyan on the phone, although, I’m pretty sure we were either related, married, or ruling a huge country in a past lifetime, sans colonialism. She is a Brooklyn Doula, I am a writer, and we have a lot in common, and I mean A LOT. For starters, we are both mothers. Anna is a mother to two small children, ages 7 and 3. I am a mother to three small children, ages 7, 5, and 3. We both graduated high school the same year. Our birthdays are almost numerically identical. Also, we have the same first name! As these details begin to unfold during two deep conversations, I feel the need to rip off all my clothes and yell “This is amazing!” to the sky but I don’t want to scare my new friend. And besides, the most common detail Anna and I have in common are none of these witchy coincidences. Instead, what we connected on the most was the idea of the internal self and how it relates to the “befores” and the “afters” of motherhood. Or, as Anna puts it: “The loud voice of our past versus the wise woman ahead, who’s there, but she’s very quiet. We must lean in to hear her.” I know, I know, why didn’t we all marry this woman?

I call Anna on a warm Wednesday afternoon. Her voice matches the weather. She’s kind and open, the way only seasoned women who have frequently stood in a room at the precipice of life and death can be. If there is fear or anxiety about our interview, I can’t tell. Anna exudes a sense of comfort and grace. So, it makes sense that when I ask her about her background, how she became a doula, and what led her to where she is now, her story unfolds the way a secret note might. Anna’s journey has depth and I have a desire to hear what she has to say again and again. I want to catch her wisdom in my hand and so we begin: 

Me:

It’s so nice to meet you, thank you for agreeing to do this over the phone. So, I guess I’ll start with where are you from and what sparked your interest in becoming a doula?

Anna C.: 

I’m originally from Austin, Texas but I graduated high school in 1999 and then I went to SUNY Purchase where I studied dance. I was a professional dancer after college, and I also babysat and waited tables to make extra money. The human body, healthcare, and even self-care was the initial spark for me in terms of becoming a doula. Birth always held an interest for me, the process of birthing another human being. 

Me:

Did you know immediately that you wanted to be a doula because of this interest in birthing another human?

Anna C.:

No, not really. I mean, I thought I wanted to be a midwife first because a lot of my friends started having children in their late 20s and so I really thought a lot about becoming a midwife.

Me:

So, you were drawn to the process when you saw all your friends having babies and something changed in you, or was it also something else?

Anna C.: 

Well, I mean, initially yes, I saw my friends having kids and this idea of the “event” of how a body comes out of a body really drew me in. The health process and the “body-event” of birth was also somewhat related to my dance background. But the physiological and anatomical event of how a body comes out of a body held and still holds a huge fascination for me.

Me:

I mean, I don’t know if you feel this way but after I had kids, I understood why the whole world is afraid of women. 

Anna C.:

That’s so interesting, what do you mean by that?

Me:

I mean, I felt like I could have played in the NFL the day I birthed my children, and I absolutely could have won. Move over Tom Brady! The strength I felt. It’s sort of beautiful and depressing but I felt like that day was the first day in my whole life as a woman when I truly loved myself, all of myself, and I could see how magnificent I was as a being on this planet. And then there’s this idea of who I was before that moment forever changed me, and who I am now, and maybe who I am going to be.

Anna C.:

This is so amazing because I think a lot about that. I think so often about the woman I used to be versus the wise woman I am continuing to grow into. There is the loud voice of our past versus the wise woman ahead, who’s there, but she’s very quiet. We must lean in to hear her. I often think that the voice of the past is so loud it is drowning out the future self’s voice. Some days it is so difficult to grapple with these two selves.

Me:

Can I stay on the phone with you for the rest of my life!?!? Yes! But those two selves are so necessary, one can’t exist without the other.

Anna C.:

Oh, absolutely. And my experience as a doula before and after my experience as a mother has changed drastically. 

Me:

How so?

Anna C.:

Well, I did first time doula work for three years. I trained as a doula, got certified, and then I worked for three years. But when I birthed my own baby, I had more of a foundational understanding of what it means to birth a child. 

Me:

What changed specifically?

Anna C.: There was just a significant shift from being almost passive about the birthing process to being truly connected to it as well as truly connected to the post-partum process.

The next time I meet Anna, it’s on a muggy Monday in Park Slope. We meet at Bank Street coffee on Flatbush Avenue, and I spot Anna first because she’s got a cute pixie haircut, a flowy skirt, and an aqua blue button down on. But what I really notice is how she’s holding a huge backpack like a newborn. “There’s my Brooklyn doula!” I say while crossing Flatbush to meet her. We’re waving to each other already, our hands like four S.O.S. flags of motherhood in the distance. For some reason, my children and Anna’s children had separate meltdown mornings at home before our meeting. I wonder if it’s too early for tequila, but we settle on cappuccinos and ease into our seats as the barista foams our milk. My before-self sneaks up on me and I picture the two of us as eighth graders with side ponytails chewing bubble gum and making lanyard friendship bracelets. But here we are in the present moment, exhausted mothers, wise women of the Brooklyn village. Today our coffee talk begins with what it’s like raising children in Brooklyn, how to deal with meltdowns, and how hard we are on ourselves, the difficulties of forgiving ourselves, and what it means to fall apart. Today, we’re both at the tail end of that list. 

Anna C.: It’s been a rough morning. 

Me: Yeah, I totally get it. This is a nice coffee shop.

Anna C.: It is, I like it here. 

Me: Ok, so the last time we spoke we talked a lot about what it means to step into this new self. I think one of the challenges for me is that I’ve had a few moments since birthing my children when I really feel like I am falling apart. 

Anna C.: Oh, absolutely. I had a morning like that today. Especially during and after the pandemic, the “falling apart” can take on many meanings.

Me: It can. I’m sure you and I had similar experiences with having a baby right before the pandemic hit. Can you tell me about that and about where you’re headed in terms of your practice?

Anna C.: Well, it’s interesting, when my youngest was born we moved away. We drove to Texas, and I did fall apart. Yet, it was a productive falling apart. 

Me: In what way?

Anna C.: Well, I started to realize some things about what we experience internally after birth. It’s like what makes it hard is so different from what makes it hard. I don’t know if that makes sense when I say it but it’s true. I’ll say it again. What makes this experience hard is so different from what makes this experience hard.

Me: The internal experience is always so difficult to explain. I went back to work two weeks after my youngest was born because I had to make a living. Now that sounds crazy, but I had tunnel vision and I think my body has suffered tremendously because I did that. I’m just now, at 42, after three children, learning to listen to my body.

Anna C.: There is absolutely an internal experience, and that goes from internal self to the identity shift we were talking about last time. There is a former self we shed, and a shift to a social self and all these factors taking place. But it can also be a moment of self-discovery. After I had my productive falling apart, I realized that as a doula, I’m not just a “doer”, I actually have something to say. I have something important to say. 

Me: What is it that you have to say?

Anna C.: So much, where do I begin? I’d like to start with the question of why is this internal experience a problem? What is challenging for people with these internal experiences and how can I facilitate an easier path for them post-birth, early-birth, even after the first year of motherhood. How can we find and learn to express what is happening inside of ourselves even into our children’s toddlerhood? Some women are also experiencing perimenopause and post-partum around the same time. 

Me: I think I’m going through that. I had no idea that post-partum can last for three years.

Anna C.: Yeah, oh yeah. They’ve discovered a lot of new research about that.

Me: I fell apart much later, after my third child. During the pandemic it was easy for me to hunker down with the kids. Coming back out into the world has been the hardest thing for me and you’re right, I have no way to express what is going on inside of me. 

Anna C.: Those internal experiences that we don’t quite have words for are the reason I have a lot to say. I think the need for a deeper kind of care even after the newborn stage is crucial after birth. 

Me: Care for the mother?

Anna C.: Yes, for the mother, but also for the mother and child, and family as a whole. We all need care. The whole family. 

Me: We do.

Anna C.: We really do.

I talked to Anna for two hours. It was like sitting on a cabin porch with a knitted quilt wrapped around me. Later, I stalked her Instagram and found the real gold nuggets of her practice. In a world of insecurity, anxiety, and fear, Anna Carapetyan reminds us through her own experiences of the fragility and sacred nature of life. To care for ourselves, all of ourselves, and to care for our children while caring for ourselves truly takes a village. I close her Instagram page after I read the one post I was meant to linger with. It is a video of Anna speaking to the camera after a back injury. Even in her own pain she guides us as she speaks:

When we’re recovering from birth, illness, injury, pregnancy loss or termination, going through a grief process or other life event that necessitates the support of family and community, we learn about our comfort and our edges.

It can be hard to allow people to care for us. When it is hard, it’s also an opportunity for growth.

There’s a point in the process when the opportunity is especially alive.

It’s not when the pain or the learning is most acute and claiming the majority of our attention. It’s usually pretty easy to accept support then.

Birth parents I work with will usually let me spoon feed them their first meal after birth, but a week later it’s much harder to get them to allow me to heat up a meal or bring a snack to their bedside.

It’s when we’re feeling just strong enough to get up and go through the house picking up laundry we’ve strewn about or stand at the stove heating up our own soup.

*It’s when we know we could do those things but it would cost us energy that could otherwise be used for further recovery and re-building.*

Everyone dreams of living in Brooklyn at some point in their lives. If someone says this isn’t true, they’re lying. The brownstone brick, the tree lines streets, and the tin roofs of coffee shops evoke a sense of wonder.

“Hey Lady, move a little slower why don’t ya, it’s not like I have anywhere to be!”

The man in the Fresh Direct delivery truck turning from 5^th Avenue onto Union Street is most likely my exact age. He’s a dark-haired beauty with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, five o’clock shadow, white t-shirt, and a blue and white trucker hat with red letters across the front that spell out “I PEE IN POOLS”. If I wasn’t holding my three-year-old son’s hand, balancing a tote bag on one shoulder, and trudging along a heavy sack of groceries; if my tits didn’t look like sandbags, if this were twenty-five years ago, I might have smiled. Maybe. We might have exchanged numbers, and I would have absolutely bought a matching hat in pink. But because I’m tired, and middle-aged, and a mother, and mostly because I’m from Brooklyn, I shift the shopping bag from my hand to my wrist so that I can flag my middle finger in this guy’s face. 

“Sit on it and rotate, asshole,” I yell, to which he responds by blowing me a kiss, to which I respond with the typical, smirking, “in your dreams, buddy.” 

It doesn’t matter that some of my hair is gray. Who cares that the brown stain on my sweatshirt from a greasy falafel ball looks like a dirty heart. It doesn’t even really make a difference that my son, trailing alongside me, has his finger all the way inside of his nose almost down to the ashy knuckle. In Brooklyn, I am beautiful, aging backwards like my borough. The man in the Fresh Direct truck is a bonus. He’s my daily reminder that no matter what happens, “I still got it,” even if the “it” that I “got” is a shitty attitude and a lot of confidence. 

Brooklyn exists in a cloud of nostalgia. It is the borough of “before.” It is the county of sentimentality, wistfulness, and the memory of a yesterday we aren’t even sure existed in the first place. Everyone wants a piece. Everyone dreams of living in Brooklyn at some point in their lives. If someone says this isn’t true, they’re lying. The brownstone brick, the tree-lined streets, and the tin roofs of coffee shops evoke a sense of wonder. People who grew up here, or even long-time residents who have made it to Brooklynite status, shamelessly recount tales of “the old days.” The old days are visions of a time when things in Brooklyn were real, original, creative, authentic. In these tales told by Brooklyn elders, life always appear to be better or simpler. The stories often begin with a setting or an unlucky situation. 

“I grew up on President Street. But it was when President Street was really Brooklyn.” Another popular opener is, “One time my dad went to my school with a baseball bat to handle things with the class bully. That was old school. That’s how we dealt with things back then.” Back then. The story unfolds as if there is a lease on time and that part of history never moved past the father’s grip on the bat. In the myths and legends of Brooklyn, store owners know every child’s name on the block, bad guys get dealt with by tough guys, and parents are rarely around, entrusting their children to the peeping eyes of the neighborhood grandmothers who lean out of windows in floral nightgowns and see all. In this way Brooklyn and its people never grow old, even if they are old. In fact, they don’t grow old even if they’re dead. Brooklyn is fiction; the Never Neverland of New York. 

My own story of Brooklyn is broadcast in a similar fashion. When approached by a stranger with the question “where are you from?” my answer is always, “I’m from Brooklyn.” Most of the time, the question that follows is, “no, but originally.” I think the reason for this is that nowadays I look like a midwestern Mom of three who has no clue where I left the keys to my apartment even though they’re in the tie-dye fanny pack attached to my waist. This makes my nostalgic Brooklyn tale even more crucial. “What? What do you mean? I’m from Brooklyn, and my father’s from Brooklyn, and my grandparents came here when they were six! And everyone in my family watched the Brooklyn Dodger games from their roof! Oh, and Coney Island, we went to Coney all the time, and ate hot dogs, and we were happy!” As I scream and rant about the schools I attended, how my mother would take me to the Brooklyn Museum every weekend, how my Dad’s best friend lived on fifteenth off of Prospect Park and got stabbed ten times on his way home one day, I wonder if I am telling the stories to prove something to the listener, or more so to prove something to myself. 

As our own youth disappears, as the reality of the enormity of life shifts into clear view, the stories we tell ourselves, the narratives we save for others, becomes the history of a borough that never wanted to grow up. There are always two Brooklyns simultaneously existing for most of us. For example, when I flip off the Fresh Direct, Bruce Springsteen look-a-like driver, I also feel the past creep up my neck like a whisper from a stranger in a dark bar. “Hey,” the voice says, “tell me something about yourself.” The man in the truck, cigarette falling from full lips, tempts the me from another time. But the reality, the day-to-day is often bleak, and out of this daily bleakness is where the seed of beauty is planted. In a few hours I must pick my two daughters up from school. At five o’clock I have to make dinner. At eight o’clock everyone goes to bed after a bath, and then I get ready for the next day. School, lunch, walking to my Mom’s house to give her a shower because she’s just had hip surgery. More cooking, waiting for my husband’s day off so that I can do everyone’s laundry. Then the stories emerge, erupting out of me, the tales my children will tell to keep the heart of the neighborhood beating forward into tomorrow.

“Mami yells at the drivers on the street,” my seven-year-old has been known to tell her teachers at school. “She gets so mad and then she yells and then they wait for us to cross the street. Also, one time, Mami chased a delivery guy on a bike because he didn’t say excuse me.” Her teachers nod and smile, and at a parent-teacher conference they show me a picture she drew of me running after the cyclist. I laugh because the legends of the Brooklyn mother have already started circulating throughout the grade and on the classroom’s group chat. In Brooklyn, to become a legend, even if only in a small child’s Crayola depiction, is to age backwards, to be frozen in the time of someone else’s memory. To be a part of Brooklyn, to become its concrete, its brownstones, its front stoop chalk games, is to have stories told about you by someone else.

After all, life can be mundane at best, cruel at worst. As the Fresh Direct truck disappears into the distance of Union Street, the grocery bag I am holding rips open halfway down the block. A box of gluten free cookies, a large can of coconut water, an organic dark chocolate bar, three apples, and two ripe bananas roll out onto the sidewalk. “Shit,” I say staring at the pretentious mess in front of me. The spill has me asking myself what version of Brooklyn I am living in now. When historians look back at Brooklyn today, will a sepia photo of me screaming on a street corner holding my son’s hand appear? Will the coffee shops and restaurants have a fuzzy look to them in the textbooks people study?

“Oh man, that sucks,” a teenage boy says as he passes my mess. 

“Yeah, don’t offer to help or anything,” I snap back while shoving the chocolate and coconut water in my tote bag, trying to untangle the ripped plastic shopping bag from the bananas.

“I’m in a rush, lady,” he puts his air pods in so that he doesn’t have to hear me when I answer. 

But it doesn’t matter. I’m already fiction. I’m already aging backwards, a frozen photo still of a woman bending down to pick up her fallen groceries, on the epic, unending streets of Brooklyn.

My middle child, Alma, came on the heels of a miscarriage. Two months after I lost a baby, my daughter appeared on a blurry sonogram screen in a run-down doctor’s office in the heart of Brooklyn. I knew that I would name her Alma, the word for soul in Spanish, the word we say in our home when there’s something deeper than “I love you.” Mi Alma, we say in Spanish, my soul. 

Alma will be five years old in December and she’s having a tough time. Today she is the middle child. She’s right in the middle, two years older than her brother, Mathias, and two years younger than her big sister, Helen. In her short five years she has lived through the death of one grandmother and the grief of a father. She has lived through a pandemic. She has lived through staying inside for a year or two. She has lived through masks, and hand sanitizer. She has lived through a traumatic seizure her little brother had when he was almost two. She has lived. 

On Sunday, Alma’s tantrum was the worst it has been since she was three, when we adopted the comical name “threenager” and were convinced that by five the meltdowns would cease. But this was the first time I feared my own child. It was also the first time I had to remove my other two children, take them into the bedroom, and close the door saying through a crack “when you can calm down, Mami can open the door.” I was afraid of my almost five-year-old, I was afraid of my soul. Mi Alma. 

A child’s behavior is often a two-way street. In a parenting webinar I take out of desperation, the host speaks to me through a screen and says, “the child’s behavior is usually in direct reaction to the adult’s behavior”. This is a complex idea for me, especially because Alma is the child who is most like me in personality and empathy. She’s also my most tactile child, always needing to be close, comforted, hugged, and snuggled. When inside my belly, she carved out a space in my spine and stayed there for much of the final trimester. She found such a cozy spot inside of my womb that I now have three engorged discs in my back that will never go back to normal. With Alma I had sciatica down my left leg, I had gurd, I had so much trouble sleeping, I would sit on the couch and just cry. But when she arrived, she was the sweetest baby in the nursery. My night nurse at the hospital said that every nurse fought to hold Alma because she was so sweet and quiet, a good eater, and a gem to hold. 

On Sunday I hold Alma in my arms on the floor as she wails. “Aaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh,” she screams so loud I fear the other neighbors in my apartment complex might knock on the door to ask what’s going on. And I would have to tell them, “This is a tantrum, my daughter is throwing a tantrum.” The baby starts to cry, Helen starts to cry, and finally, when Alma won’t stop, I start to cry. It’s all just too much sometimes. 

I’m not always a great mother. My friends say that I am and that makes me think I’m like a night villain wearing a cape, pretending to be a normal citizen when really, I feel like a creep most of the time. I get very angry sometimes, annoyed, impatient. When Alma starts to cry because she can’t have what she wants, which is often these days, I get upset, I scold, I leave the room. Sometimes I lose my temper, and this makes me feel like the worst mother on the planet even though I’m human, even though I know mothers lose their tempers, even though I know, I know, I know. But the mother guilt, the mother wound is sometimes stronger than what’s real. Sometimes, as a mother, it’s hard to find the truth in the middle of a tsunami.

“Alma, mi Alma,” I coo in Spanish. “Alma, are you happy?” I ask one day holding my middle child in my arms on my yoga mat after she has stepped in front of my video to cry and scream that someone took her toy.

“Yes,” she nods.

“Alma, mi Alma,” I continue, “did you have a good day at school yesterday?”

“Yes,” she says again. My hands are interlaced with her tiny fingers. I wonder how a child so small can make such a huge fire in the belly.

“Are you angry at Mommy? Are you angry at Papi? Are you angry at Helen? Are you angry at Mathias?”

“No, no, no, no, no.”

“Do you know we love you?”

“Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.” 

A friend suggests I ask simple questions to find out what’s going on. “Ask her to find out, to figure it out,” she says, as if motherhood is that simple, as if there’s always an answer and when we have it everything will go back to normal, as if normal is a place or an award we can achieve. 

After the tears I pack a lunch and get everyone dressed. “Come on you guys,” I smile, my eyes puffy from exhaustion, “let’s go to our tree.”

One of my children’s favorite places is a tree deep in Prospect Park that has fallen over. It’s where Alma feels most free to climb and sit calmly with her siblings. We bring grapes, turkey sandwiches, and little cartons of organic chocolate milk. The air in Brooklyn is crisp. The leaves down Prospect Park West promise a colorful fall, a bright school year. The browns, yellows, blazing oranges lead the way toward a little salvation on the weekends. The children build forts, magical kingdoms where only they can save a village that has been under attack by an evil monster. We sit on the grass and get our jeans muddy from a fallen rain from the night before. A puppy nearby catches a tennis ball in his mouth and brings it back to his owner. Two lovers kiss and embrace under an old oak tree. 

I remember just two years ago when Prospect Park was the only salvation for a city suffering silently with the rest of the world. I remember how we felt: alone, afraid, and unsure of what the universe held in store for us. Perhaps this is how children feel a lot of the time, especially tactile children like Alma who need to be comforted more often, who need to be reassured that, “everything will be alright, shush now, everything will be fine.”

“Mami,” Alma says happier than she has looked all week, “Did you know that a big monster was living in our tree, but he was a friendly monster and now we can climb the tree with him and he gets us candy?”

“Wow, really?” I say, “what a nice monster!”

“Mami,” Alma looks at me the sun glinting off her brown eyes, a strand of hair caught on her cheek.

“Yes, my love?”

“I’m sorry I screamed.” She hugs me.

“Thank you for saying sorry. It’s ok to be angry, right?”

“Yes,” she answers, “but it’s not ok to have a tantrum and hurt people.”

I know we’re learning. I know that together we’re learning. I know this. Deep in my soul, in the depths of my alma, I know. The park’s beauty promises salvation, patience, wonder, and the magic of childhood. At almost five years old, Alma knows this too. 

“Mami, I love it here,” she laughs while running to her tree, because in this moment it’s hers, something all for herself, something that’s big enough for everyone so she doesn’t have to share it. She doesn’t have to squeeze herself in the middle for it. She doesn’t have to throw herself on the floor and beg to be seen. On the heels of winter, the Brooklyn leaves carry her, and by carrying her, they carry me too. They carry all of us forward as we approach the darkest months. And if we look closely enough, we can see that the dark and the cold is really just a hiding place full of brilliant light.