Have Breast, Will Travel

For the past seven years, my days have been defined by the routine care of children. Lacking day care, I haul them with me on errands or I don’t go at all. (Christian does a lot more lunchtime errand running now than he did in days past.) I have a semi-regular babysitter now to give me time to write, but basically, the baby stays with me, because one thing we don’t have in this house is bottles. We don’t even own any.

Sometimes it’s frustrating to feel tied down, but in general I am at peace with our choice to exclusively breastfeed. People who haven’t breastfed their kids don’t get it; they look at me blankly and say, “Can’t you just leave him with a sitter? I mean, you could pump so they could give him a bottle, couldn’t you?” I have to explain that even if the sitter gives him a bottle, all the milk he was supposed to drink at that time still has to come out of my body. And I loathe pumping. I am in awe of the self-sacrifice routinely practiced by mothers who pump at work every day. Oh. My. Goodness. You deserve a medal. (You know who you are. You rock, ladies.)

So I choose to stay attached to my babies. I’ve become pretty adept at typing one-handed, and I save certain projects (blog reading, for instance) for nursing times. When Michael’s in a mood to concentrate on his job, I can read books to the other kids. He stays with me while I write, he stays with me while I teach lessons, he stays with me while we play for weddings. This is my life; it has been my life for the last seven years and four babies.

But there are days. Like this weekend, when Christian and I played a wedding.

On the wedding front, we’ve gone back and forth, trying out different solutions to the professional-musician, fully-nursing-mom dynamic. We choose different solutions depending on the age and the mood of the baby on a given day. This weekend we did the “bring baby along” thing, because he was cranky and we had a young sitter.

Michael amused himself in his car seat through the prelude and processional, but during the psalm, I heard Unhappy Baby Noises. By the time I got back to the music area, someone had come over to pick him up, offering to hold him. I hated to have a wedding guest drooled upon and distracted during the exchange of vows, so I said we’d be fine; at this point I was basically just singing a Mass, and I could do that holding a baby.

The only trouble? What he really wanted was three minutes on the breast to fall asleep. And I couldn’t leave. So I held him carefully down-wind of the microphone and kept my finger in his mouth as he alternately sucked and chomped on it. I thought he might actually bite through it at one point. My pointer finger was positively numb by the time Communion was over, and he was at the end of his rope, proceeding from noisy slurping and occasional whimpers to out-and-out cries of “Feed me NOW, Woman!” I bolted for the sacristy even before Christian stopped playing.

Michael was so tired, he went down in ten seconds, but knowing him as I do, I didn’t dare move. Christian ended up playing the recessional solo. It works fine, and by that point in a wedding I question whether anyone even noticed my absence, but still, I wince. Because I need to be professional, too, and wrestling a baby while playing a wedding felt anything but.

Oh, well. Michael’s baby days are passing; this is a fleeting time in my life, after all. Soon enough my body will be my own again, and we’ll be on to a whole different, far more complicated set of problems to solve. Might as well enjoy this bunch while it lasts.

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Published in: on April 16, 2012 at 7:38 am  Comments (4)  
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Close To Me

Scene: Morning on Spring Break, time to go outside and play. I’m going through the complicated maneuver of putting on Julianna’s shoes with a growth on my back.

Scene: 8:30 Mass on a Sunday morning. We’re sitting in the front pew–taking up the whole front pew– and it’s time to kneel down. Only I can’t. There’s only room for one knee at the very edge of the kneeler, because my three ambulatory children have decided they all need to inhabit the end where I’m sitting. I have to physically push children farther down the pew to make room for myself.

Scene: my nursing chair in the corner of my bedroom, with a baby who can’t decide if he wants to eat or play. Nicholas climbs up on the Medela foot stool and leans over top of the baby, who grunts and lets go the breast in order to concentrate on, I don’t know, BREATHING. Julianna takes flank position, leaning over the arm rest and putting her weight on my arm–the one trying to support Michael’s head at the breast. “Guys!” I say, exasperated. “Back off!” Michael wiggles and laughs.

Scene: Good Friday services. Christian is out of town, so I’ve called on my cousin to sit with us and help me wrangle children. They like my cousin. They’ve stayed at her house several times while I’ve had professional commitments. But they want nothing to do with her. As the service goes on, there is a silent but ongoing wrestling match for who gets to sit by Mommy. The end result is that between my cousin at the end of the pew and us there is a dead space of almost three feet, followed by five bodies piled on top of each other. When at last I hand the baby down to her–the only one who can’t move himself–Nicholas lights up and dives for my lap.

Perhaps I have a magnetic personality.

Published in: on April 12, 2012 at 7:53 am  Comments (6)  
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Persecution Complex

Photo by thefost, via Flickr

I have this persecution complex. It dates back to the days when I was engaged to an atheist and I knew I had no business being so. But despite the nudges from my conscience, I couldn’t (or wouldn’t) break it off.

Ever since then, any time I’ve been involved with something I love, I get this niggling feeling of guilt. As if the simple fact that it’s something I want to do means it’s automatically something I shouldn’t.

Mothers in general are highly susceptible to feelings of inadequacy. We never do enough. We never keep our tempers under stress the way we think we should; we never juggle the responsibilities properly–we always, always measure up as less than in our own minds. And judging other mothers–an activity in which we all participate, whether or not we admit it–adds to our own sense of being Not Good Enough.

Imagine me, then, admitting at last that I am no longer a stay-at-home mom, but a work-at-home mom. Guilt steps up and starts poking me with pinprick pincers. If I didn’t write, my house would be cleaner, and I’d spend more time doing “mom” things with my kids, so that when my three-year-old went for a DIAL screening he didn’t get marked down for not being able to use a scissors. Surely I’d do better with faith formation, and Julianna would be farther along the path to speech, so they wouldn’t think she has to spend two-thirds of her time in a self-contained classroom. I wouldn’t get mad when they fight and break things, because I’d be there to arbitrate and redirect. Right?

Obviously, then, I must not be doing what God has in mind for me. I’m being selfish by pursuing a writing career, however humble. My vocation as a mother should stand pristine, undiluted, in the center of my life, and anything that distracts me is Not. God’s. Will, even and perhaps especially if I enjoy it.

Like I said: persecution complex.

Yesterday was Palm Sunday, with an Old Testament reading from Isaiah:

The Lord God has given me
a well-trained tongue,
that I might know how to speak to the weary
a word that will rouse them.
Morning after morning
he opens my ear that I may hear;
and I have not rebelled,
have not turned back.

It seemed a beautiful affirmation. And then it seemed sacrilegious to hear any word meant for me in a passage referring to Jesus.

I am beginning to realize that I may never know for sure that what I think is God’s will for me, actually is. I just have to muddle along as best I can, and accept that rock-solid certainty is not a commodity I’ll ever have in abundance. And in the end, maybe that’s okay. Because as long as I don’t know for certain, I keep seeking. And as long as I am seeking, I don’t become complacent.

Published in: on April 2, 2012 at 8:04 am  Comments (11)  
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First Grade Sex Ed

Sex Ed (The Office)

Sex Ed (The Office) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I learned more about my son’s first grade class in ten minutes on the highway than I’ve learned all year at the dinner table.

We were returning from picking up a friend for an overnight. As my crowded van sped down the highway, the boys started discussing school. “Do you remember (X) doing his freak-out dance?”

“Bow-wow-freak-out!” Hysterical giggles. First grade humor. I tuned out–until I heard, “…you know, when he said the word that means…” I glanced in the rearview and saw Alex’s friend indicating a particular part of his body.

“His penis?” Alex said innocently.

“Don’t say it!”

I began to listen carefully. The details were a little muddy, but the story involved the word “wiener” and miming riding a motorcycle. Not particularly risqué, but clearly, the boys found it so. It had all the hallmarks of the scenarios I’ve outlined before: the “dirty” feeling, the embarrassed giggles, the body as the butt of titillating jokes.

I wanted to intervene, but my kids weren’t the only ones in the car. It’s not my place to teach someone else’s kids about sexuality. Right?

“This is where it begins,” Christian warned when I told him about it. “You’d better nip this in the bud.” I threw my hands helplessly in the air, for the first time caught unprepared.

It was a busy weekend, and nearly two days passed before I got a chance to draw Alex aside. Yet even with 48 hours to prep, I was woefully unprepared. I know I can cause just as many neuroses by making a federal case out of something small as I would by ignoring it altogether.

I started by asking him to tell me about it, hoping I would find inSpiration by hearing his perspectives. It didn’t really help. I pointed out that (X) might not have been talking about the penis at all. After all, “wiener” is a name for a kind of a dog and for a hot dog. And I told Alex the basic sexuality lesson: our bodies are beautiful, and we should treat them with respect.

He gave me The Look. It’s the first time I’ve been on the receiving end of The Look, but I’m sure it won’t be the last. The Look told me I had both hit the important point, and missed the delivery entirely. So I stumbled around for almost five minutes, seeking a pithy statement that never came, and finally gave it up as lost.

Three hours later, I had it: Our bodies are the gift God gave us to serve him. Everything we do to serve God, to not serve God, we use our bodies to do. That’s why our bodies are beautiful, and why we should respect them–because they’re all we have to serve God with. Fortunately, I got another shot the next day when Alex brought it up at the dinner table.

You might say I’m overreacting. Boys do toilet humor. Lots of girls do toilet humor, too. There’s a whole class of movies based on toilet humor, and good people enjoy them all the time, right? You might say I’m being a Puritan by suggesting that  bawdy humor demeans the person.

But I would respond: How can women expect to be respected by men, and men by women, when the body is treated with derision for its functions? The constant barrage of disrespect toward the physical home of our souls desensitizes us to abuses. We start to look at ourselves and everyone else as two separate entities: the soul, which is worthy of respect, and the body, which isn’t.

But that’s not how it works. Anyone who’s been on the receiving end of jokes about weight or acne or Coke-bottle glasses knows the body and soul are inseparable. An insult to one wounds the whole. Like it or not, the way we treat our bodies in thought and word and action impacts the whole person.

Besides, little ears are listening. Ever since that day, Nicholas has been repeating softly, “Bow-wow freak out.”  If he got that, what else  did he “get”? Somewhere in that mysterious little brain, he’s processing all he heard from the Big Boys. He doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about, but he heard the word “penis” and he heard someone he looks up to acting like it’s a scandalous thing.

Personally, I’d rather I and my children view themselves and everyone they know with a sense of wonder and beauty.

Parents of older children–you’ve all had situations come up. Kids start learning about and processing their sexuality a bit at a time, usually in the presence of their peers. I’d like to be better prepared the next time. What situations and attitudes have you encountered as kids get older? How did you deal with them?

Published in: on March 29, 2012 at 7:22 am  Comments (16)  
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The Passing of the Baby Years

Alex, April 2005

It crept up on me, this wistfulness. A  feeling that these days are slipping away like pearls through my fingers. The way he looks at me and the wiggles settle into stillness. The way his whole face lights up when he smiles, just because I looked at him and said hello. Moments that make my heart hiccup.

It was the end of a long, very busy and chaotic day. Both sets of grandparents in the house, and Next Littlest Brother bouncing off the walls from birthday cake (in the middle of Lent) and presents. By 7:30,  Michael vibrated like a coiled spring, his little muscles taut, his head batting from side to side.

Julianna, March 17, 2007 in the PICU

My mother, with the slow gentleness she only exhibits toward grandbabies, settled him against her chest and took him upstairs. I followed, a moth drawn to a flame. She laid him down on the carpet in

the hallway, speaking softly to him as the shrieking glee continued downstairs. “It’s time to get you settled down, little boy,” she said, and his face nearly split with joy, legs and arms kicking wildly. “Does your mama have something more comfortable to put you in?”

I retrieved his sleeper, and we continued to sit there, two grown women reduced to helpless adoration by a fourteen-pound child. And a deep pang spread outward from the center of my chest, crushing breath for a moment. Because this stage is passing away and if, as I expect, we have to call it at four, I’m experiencing it for the last time.

“I don’t remember this stage with the others,” I said softly. “I’m trying to really live in the moment…but I don’t remember it with the others. I keep hoping once it’s all past, from a distance I’ll be able to pull it out, I’ll be able to look back and remember. Really remember. But I’m afraid it’s just going to be gone.”

Nicholas, March 2009

My mother’s hand brushed over his body. “It’s going to be gone,” she said, the voice of experience. “And grandchildren are different.”

I bent down and pressed myself against the tiny body, willing my nerves to capture the sensation and hold it, knowing they aren’t capable. And I wondered: am I really ready to move on? For a moment, weakened uterine walls and early deliveries and NICU stays and the sheer chaos of daily life with four children, one of whom has special needs–all of it disappeared into petty nothingness against the emptiness of life After Babies.

Because let’s face it, I’m a baby person. Two years from now I’ll be pulling my hair out over Michael, who will be saying “no” and breaking things and wanting me to play with him (blech!). Right now, his desires and mine are in nearly perfect unison. I want to touch him and talk to him and hold him, and he wants to be touched and talked to and held. Not that there aren’t frustrations–there are–and of course, not having to wash diapers every 48 hours, and being able to sleep at night, are big pluses to the later stages. Still, Babyhood is the part I love most about small childhood. Holding someone else’s baby just isn’t the same, at least not for me. There isn’t that visceral reaction, that gut-deep connection between me and this particular child, who is mine to care for, for whom I am the center of the world.

Michael, Dec. 1, 2011

Michael is on my lap now, tired and refusing to nurse, as has been his pattern of late, and reminding me that babyhood isn’t all transcendent moments. We really are stretched to our limit now. The kids we have need us, and there already isn’t enough to go around (how long has it been since I practiced my flute, for instance?). But I understand now how a woman can enjoy a “change-of-life baby” in a way she hasn’t been able to enjoy earlier babies. The kids go off to school, and it’s just Mommy and Baby again, like it was with the first one…only then, she was too freaked out to enjoy it properly.

Will we go that route? Honestly, it’s hard to imagine. My body really is pretty beat up from surgeries, and with three rambunctious boys, Christian sees college bills and car insurance premiums barreling down on us, to say nothing of the big unknown that is Julianna’s future. We have to be responsible.

But it makes me sad.

Published in: on March 22, 2012 at 8:06 am  Comments (9)  
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A Portrait of Nicholas

This isn’t something I do often, but just for my own sake, I want to share a glimpse of my kids, separate from how they interact with me (which is what I usually write). Since I’ve been struggling with the stage Nicholas is in a lot lately, it seems like a good idea to start with him, and what an amazing kid he really is.

  • He adores his baby brother, even though said brother has usurped his place in the world. He giggles every time Michael’s wildly-flailing fists contact any part of his body.
  • The cute speech-isms of new speaker are fast fading. This week I realized that “too-ie” has now become “cookie,” and “the nail has a tail” (the snail has a tail–sounds rather Dr. Suessish, doesn’t it?) has now become “the sail has a tail.” He drives Alex crazy by repeating everything he says. A few days ago we spent Michael’s morning nursing going back and forth on the word “harmonica.” He tried it five times, and three of them came out as “formica,” “Mo-hannah” and “har-monta.”
  • He’s getting to be a whiz at puzzles; this part of the age of three I do love, because I love doing puzzles. He’s working a 100-piece Thomas puzzle and a 30-piece fire station puzzle all by himself. Welll, mostly all by himself.
  • He loves to paint.
  • His conversations with Julianna are adorable. They trade off big sibling status; they bicker over toys three dozen times a day, but in between, they crack each other up. They like to hold hands, and he takes the lead in this matter all the time.
  • He instinctively understands that he has to ask Julianna yes or no questions, so they can converse quite fluently despite Julianna’s limited and still barely intelligible vocabulary. In fact, they converse much better with each other than Julianna does with any of the rest of us.
  • We have never had a conversation with him about Down syndrome, and thus he’s growing up with a much more organic picture of what it means to be Julianna’s brother than Alex has. It will be interesting to see how he and Alex process the subject when they get older.
  • He’s so ready to go to school. In two weeks, he’ll be screened as a peer mentor for next fall, and we plan to send him to preschool at Early Childhood Special Ed. Every day, he tells someone that “Juweeanna wides the ye-ow bus, and I wide the bwue one.” (That would be a city bus…but he’s never been on one, except in his dreams.)
  • He’s been dry at night several times, with help. We’ve undertaken a new project, you see, tired of quadruple diapering at night, and we’re getting the kids up at our bedtime and in the middle of the night when Michael nurses. Trying to train little bodies to wake up when bladders get full.
  • And yesterday, Hallelujah Lord, he reached for the open compartment on the printer….and then, remembering how many times he’s been scolded not to touch it , he stopped, looked at me and said meekly, “Do you need that closed, Mommy?” As a reward for asking, I let him close it. And then I gave him a big hug and told him how proud of him I was.

And–how appropriate–he just came over and said, “Mommy, I need you.” Translated: I want to sit on your lap. So here he sits, asking where O is and what the camera is, and did I push the “i”? and “N starts with me!” (Meaning, his name starts with N.) Another day in the life begins.

Published in: on March 15, 2012 at 6:54 am  Comments (3)  
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A Welcome Detour

Photo by Fuyoh!, via Flickr

Call me dense, but I just realized the other night that the ability to multitask has a downside. Namely, a person who can split hands into one task and brain to another is never fully engaged in either…which means she (read that: “I”) cannot block out distractions.

In the last few weeks, I’ve found it increasingly difficult to concentrate on my work, when it’s time to work. (Yeah, right.) Everything came to a head on Thursday, when I was trying to knock out a rough draft of an assignment that’s been causing me trouble. I don’t want to spend my life repeating I HATE age three, so Friday I resolved to take a day off work and just focus on family and home.

I probably started in the wrong place: two hours in the grocery store and several dozen variations on the words “Julianna, STAY HERE.” Then it was lunch and a conference call about our new local Down syndrome parent network, and up to school to go to Stations of the Cross with Alex. Lo and behold, the day was over, and not one lick of housework had been done. Suddenly I realized why it’s been so hard for me to make headway lately.

And then, of course, there was the swing.

Our wind-up swing is a hand-me-down that looks like this, only with a vinyl seat cover. I love it because it does NOT require batteries, and the wind-up status prevents you from going off and ignoring your child for long periods of time. It’s a tool to be used when Baby really needs movement and Mommy really needs her hands.

I love this swing. So, unfortunately, do the kids. Unfortunately, because a swing that old is not replaceable. The mechanism jammed once before when we over-wound the spring, and Christian spent almost an hour working on it before he got it fixed. So ever since I pulled it out a week ago, I’ve been trying without success to keep little hands off it. We had several battles on Friday, two more at dinnertime–during which Nicholas pushed it higher than it ever swings with a baby in it–and when I went to put Michael in it while I did dishes, it was jammed. Christian tried to fix it, but the old plastic parts inside snapped. Bye-bye, swing.

My frustration reached epic levels. I sometimes call Nicholas a “Destructicon”–rip books, turn off computers, get things out, throw them on the floor, break baby gear. I just want him to STOP IT. But I also know me choking on rage isn’t going to make it happen. I want to enjoy parenthood, not stew over what cannot be changed. And I remember that when Alex was going through this stage, I was the one who had to change first. Only…how? How do you take perfectly justifiable frustration and simply turn it off?

“Tell you what,” Christian said that night, as I vented about the project I couldn’t finish and the kids who break everything and the desire to simply bury myself in a hole where nobody could demand my attention. “Tomorrow I’ll take them to the park for a couple of hours so you can get this writing project done.”

Saturday morning, we tore into housework while we waited for it to get warm outside. And at 10:00, they left. Michael fell asleep, and without two little screaming children in the house, he stayed that way. I sat down at the computer with one final prayer for divine help…and I got the darned thing drafted.

When my family returned home shortly before noon, I felt like a new woman. I hadn’t realized how heavily that particular project was weighing on my stress level. For the rest of the day, I didn’t fret over deadlines or the length of my to-do list. I actually felt like I was taking a day off. I cooked up a table full of unhealthy appetizer goodies to accompany a family movie. I gave baths and got kids ready for bed without once raising my voice. I enjoyed a nice evening with my husband, and at bedtime I felt only lightness and gratitude, where for so long there had been murky, bilious ick.

Sometimes, you just can’t do it by yourself. Thank God I have such a wonderful man to share my life (and my frustrations!) with.

*

Sharing my gratitude with Ann’s community at A Holy Experience

Published in: on March 12, 2012 at 8:19 am  Comments (7)  
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What Luke Skywalker Taught Me About Motherhood

The three lead protagonists of Star Wars, from...

Image via Wikipedia

It was one of those days.To wit:

Michael would not consent to be laid down…all day. Imagine. Every time I tried to make lunch, use the bathroom, or aid another child in a self-care task, I had to endure heartbreaking wails.

Nicholas kept whimpering pathetically, “I want you, Mommy!” (translated: I want to sit on your lap.) Refer to my last.

Nicholas and Julianna bickered, took toys from and pushed each other, causing periodic eruptions of screaming.

I returned to the computer after, I don’t know, changing a diaper, to find a screen display completely rearranged and a mouse on its maximum sensitivity. The screen was just tiled like a triptych–not a big deal–the point was that Nicholas has been handling, moving and breaking everything in sight lately, and he had no reason to be messing with the computer at all. I yelled at him to JUST STOP TOUCHING THINGS, and he stuck his lower lip out and pouted (this kid’s got the guilt routine down, I’m telling you) and whimpered, “I get my twuck.”

“Yes, play with your truck,” I said, clutching the shredded remains of my composure around me like a too-small robe. He got down on all fours under the computer desk…and turned off the computer power strip.

I don’t exactly remember what came out of my mouth before I clamped my lips shut on it, but you might imagine it wasn’t pretty. Not…pretty…at…all. (Stop laughing! I need several months before I can laugh at this story!)

Deep breath, missy. In…..out….in…out.

At the end of this long, hard day, I wanted nothing more than to be left alone. Alex sat down to finish Return of the Jedi. This is a new thing for him, and he’s pursuing it with his usual enthusiasm, running headlong through all three of the oldies in the span of a week. But there are some pretty intense scenes in Jedi–you know, lightning bolt torture–and I needed to tell him when to hide his eyes. So I breezed back and forth from kitchen to office to living room, narrating to Alex what was happening (because let’s be honest, a lot of it’s still over his head).

And as I watched Luke battle his darker nature, as the twin Darths pushed his buttons and dismantled his hope one block at a time, maneuvering him into an emotional corner, I suddenly recognized myself: trying–trying so hard–not to lose it. Knowing the stakes: “Once you start, forever will it dominate your destiny” (what did we ever do for wisdom before Yoda?) Trying to be serene in the face of a repeated bombardment of frustration and desperation. To focus on the choice to love, instead of giving in to my own Dark Side.

Luke finally had enough; the lightsabers came out, and he began his journey toward Ultimate Bad Guy status. But then…then he recognized what was happening. He put the brakes on, threw the weapon away, decided he’d rather die the man he wanted to be than live as everything he’d fought against.

There’s a lesson in there for me. I haven’t worked it all out yet, but I think it has something to do with choosing, time and time again, to get up after I face plant along the Mommy Road.

Like I couldn’t have worked that out for myself. Right?

(Speaking of Star Wars…we just really need some Cello Wars today.)

Published in: on March 8, 2012 at 7:20 am  Comments (10)  
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Twenty-Seven Days

If you knew you only had twenty-seven days, how would you live life differently?

I spoke recently to a friend whose daughter gave birth to a child they knew was not going to live. Indeed, it was a miracle that the child was not stillborn. “People tiptoe around us,” she said. “They’re afraid to ask. But every day of her life was a blessing. She made a bigger impact on the world in twenty-seven days than a lot of people do in ninety years.”

What would you do differently if you knew you only had twenty-seven days?

I would order out every meal. Shower only occasionally. Sleep with the baby, and “safety” be hanged. I would touch her face and breathe in her scent and try hard not to blink. I would take a thousand pictures and not bother to check if they were in focus. I would drink deep of the holiness of the moment, and let joy and grief coexist, mingling and melding until the tears that spilled over couldn’t be classified as one or the other.

And when it was over, I’d worry about everything else.

You can’t live ordinary life with that kind of intensity. Other children need their parents; there are deadlines to be met, commitments to be honored, paychecks to be earned and bills to be paid.

But as I sit and type, the three-month-old on my lap looks up at me with bright charcoal eyes and gurgles and coos at the woman who is the center of his universe, his first experience of God, of perfect, unconditional love. And his nose crinkles, and his mouth opens into a huge smile I never can quite capture. And the world has to stop for this moment, because this moment–this one–will never come again. There will be others, but this one is passing away forever and I want to hold the beauty of it, not just in my memory, but in my very skin and bones and heart.

And that is one more lesson taught by a child I never met. A child who lived only twenty-seven days.

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Published in: on March 1, 2012 at 7:01 am  Comments (8)  
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In The Moment

When your voice rouses me from deep sleep, a hair shy of 4:30 in the morning, I can tell from the intensity of your anger that you’ve been trying to get my attention for several minutes. I went to bed worried about your cough and your lack of appetite, so your energy in protesting my absence is reassuring.

I stretch you out on the table and whisper soothing words while we do the necessary work, and we retreat to the chair in the corner. For all your outrage over being made to wait, you settle into an unhurried pattern of suck-swallow-breathe, your fingers playing with the satin ribbons on my pajamas, their smoothness the first toy you’ve shown interest in.

You fall asleep quickly, and no amount of persuading can convince you to eat on the second side. I pad softly back to your room and swaddle you, but I can tell from the outset that it’s a hopeless cause. You’re already ramping back up into red-faced outrage at the idea. We return to the nursing chair, but you fall asleep without even latching. You just want to be held.

I settle in bed with you against my chest. The ghostly roar of the interstate is muted by the walls. Your father breathes deep of sleep beside us; your siblings’ sighs and low groans punctuate the velvet darkness. But this five a.m. is for us, for you with me. The weight of your tiny body spreads outward and inward and fuses with me, filling up spaces in my soul I didn’t even know were there. It turns out there’s always more room for love.

I pull the blankets up around us in a U, conscious always of your need to breathe. I pat the warm curve of your back until your body stops resisting, and you sleep at last. I drift sleepily on the wave of Spirit that comes when I am living fully in the moment. My baby boy, how I love you.

For a visit home…overnight
the soul-filling silence of a winter afternoon in the country
and a glorious night of stargazing with my oldest
two brief shooting stars
deep darkness outside the windows
and a gentle sunrise that wraps the world around, uninterrupted by other houses

For the smell of my home church wafting out to greet me upon entering the familiar space
and the chance to worship with four generations of my family

For unnamed reconciliations

For morning snuggles with a preschooler in the crook of each arm

For conversations that illuminate yet again how blessed I am in my life
and the conversations that remind me that I can never stop wrestling with the hard questions

Counting to a thousand with Ann, for the first time in quite a while

On In Around button

Published in: on February 27, 2012 at 7:47 am  Comments (10)  
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