Being a parent can be dizzying. To reorient, I look to the stars

Since becoming a parent, one of my favorite domestic tasks is taking out the bins on trash night. Not only are the blast of fresh air, the sudden darkness and the sigh of suburban quiet a welcome break from the barrage of stimulation of family life with a young child, it’s also a chance, on a clear night, to reflect on all the iterations of my pre-parenthood self that gazed up at the same night sky.

Pulling the plastic bins down the rough pavement of my driveway outside Boston, I stare up at a smattering of stars and planets. I can’t see that many from here; the band of the Milky Way that I used to see nightly when I lived in rural California is masked by lights of the city just 20 minutes away. But I find all the usual suspects a budding astronomer can recognize — the constellations of Orion, the Seven Sisters, the Big Dipper and Cassiopeia. In the clear freezing skies of winter, I spot the parallel heads of the Gemini, and the tip of one wing of Pegasus. Through much of the year I can also spot the bright steady lights of Venus, Jupiter and Saturn and the smaller, redder Mars.

These skies connect me to some of the times I felt the most free in my life — the newly independent young adult backpacking through Death Valley, surrounded by a night sky so free of moisture and light pollution there was no black, just layer upon layer of pinpricks of light, the Milky Way glowing like a road that seemed as close as the highway. While for now my life has narrowed to chicken nuggets and permission slips and playdates, the stars remind me of the dizzying dynamic dome over my head untethering me from the context of my life. I could have been anyone, or no one, on her way to becoming anybody or anything.

Now, hair graying at my temples, first appointments at the optometrist for blurring vision, I savor this time alone to take the trash out and shake hands with the universe and former iterations of myself, like a smoke break from a stressful job.

Parenting can be profoundly disorienting. Especially in the hyper-individual, nuclear-family-centered, fend-for-yourself structure of our culture, and especially for mothers. We can lose track of ourselves, when so much of the emotional and practical labor of raising children falls on our shoulders, no matter how progressive our own values, or those of our partner or community. Selfhood can feel starkly divided between before children and after, and in my experience, when we lose touch with the “before,” we can feel fractured, empty and alone.

But if early motherhood is disorienting, the night sky, for me, is deeply orienting — not only in cosmologic time, but also in my own personal history, a string connecting back to each iteration of who I’ve been. All selves accordion in under the stars — the adolescent, the young adult explorer, the tired mother — each is a star or planet, and gazing at the sky connects them together in shapes and patterns, a map of my own constellations.

The other night, after standing there on the curb, head tilted back, finding all the planets and constellations I could, I came into the house to invite my husband and son out to join me. We bundled up for the 20-degree weather and I knelt on the ground, cheek pressed to my kindergartner’s cheek, aligning his vision with mine to find Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky. I showed him Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Orion’s sword and belt and triangle hat. It felt like such essential, timeless teaching, an orientation countless parents have offered their offspring over millennia. A lesson more profound than sight words or counting things by 10, which take up most of his days at school.

For some moments, we left the world we’re used to inhabiting together and joined a bigger reality — so much more vast than our kitchen, our neighborhood, our town, state, splintering country, poisoned planet. I felt an acute knowing of my mortality, that these stars would be here long after I’m gone, and it suddenly seemed like a movie, a mom kneeling in her driveway, face pressed against her little boy’s cold face, pointing at the limits of what humans can know. I morbidly imagined him taking comfort in this memory while he pointed stars out to his own someday-kids, and felt at once an existential pain and peace — this is the way of our world. Our lives blink on and off, here under this eternal sky.

There’s a famous Buddhist saying, “After the ecstasy, the laundry.” My husband and I joke that the parenting aphorism should be, “After the laundry, the laundry.”

When we decided to leave the city for the suburbs last year, we gave up so much, but we were ready for more space, more quiet, and one of the big motivators for me was to live in a place with some access to the night sky. We would miss our friends, the familiar (too-crowded, too-narrow) streets, and all the events and activities we were part of there, but I felt the lack of darkness and astronomic context acutely.

It’s my dream to take my husband and son to one of the few truly dark places we have left in this country, to experience the night sky as I’ve known it to be. But even this view from our driveway now comforts me deeply, offering glimpses of the people I used to be, of the transcendent amid the laundry, of the universe every trash night.

Gila Lyons is a teacher of writing and literature and an author, featured most recently in the book “About Us: Essays From the Disability Series of the New York Times.” @gilalyons on X and Instagram