With my first child, I anticipated each miniscule change, charted developments, celebrated fully. Too tired and too new and too constantly engaged to realize that each first was a subtle passing. With my second child, I greeted milestones with an absentminded warmth, a mild surprise, never quite remembering exactly when to expect them. Too busy and too confident and too infinitely distracted to build heady meanings for every such and such.
But with you, my last baby, all I have is a present mind and a wistful heart. When people ask if you’ve done this yet or started that, I say, firmly, almost territorially, “She’s in no rush. She can be a baby as long as she wants.”
What I mean of course is, “I’m in no rush.”
I’m too honest and too sentimental and too vulnerable to let you take even the smallest step away from me without the dull chest ache of bittersweet longing. Often, in the quiet intimacy of you wrapped in a green towel, all wet eyelashes and goose-pimpled skin, I whisper into your temple, “Take your time.”
On particularly greedy days, “Slow down, slow down.”
I know how easily we forget and how fast. Did our first start sitting at five months or seven? Which kid used to say “Carry you” when she wanted to be held? When did we start solid foods? I try to give advice to new-moms friends and I can never say with any great certainty when my babies started doing all the miraculous things they did. These things, these massive, encompassing things, that meant everything in our lives for so long disappear so effortlessly. Our brains are constantly releasing what we don’t need, and these fragments of each other hit the cutting floor and get swept away before we ever know they are gone.
Last week, in a moment of spontaneous desperation, I watched your eight-year-old sister load the washing machine. She chattered while her capable hands completed the task, and her legs seemed suddenly spindly and unreasonably long. Where did those cheekbones come from? That elfish chin? When did they emerge so defined out of the round face I cradled in the wee whispering hours? Where was my baby?
“Come here,” I said. “Right now. I need to hold you.”
I picked your sister up, and she wrapped her legs around my waist and arms around my neck, and we both laughed under the bare bulb in the basement, laughed at the bigness of her and the smallness of me. “You’re not too big, yet.” I said, swaying back and forth, side to side, the fluid dance of mothering.
You see, sweet baby? You see how fast this life is? How enormous? You are leaving me each day that you’re here, and I am leaving a piece of myself. All we can do is take joy in our now. All I can say are the same two words. A message as much from me to the life that lies before you as it is from me to you:
Be kind.