I have been meaning to write this.
Write this, like a post-partum mother on the eve of her forty fifth birthday.
Write this, like I am able to formulate with cohesivity, the ephemeral.
My daughters are twenty and sixteen years old, respectively. My son is zero years old, 8 weeks, and 5 days. I am forty five in nineteen days time...but hey! Who is counting?
My life is nothing but a pleasure. I live each day with the sun on my face. Chubby hands of my children always reaching out for hugs. Food in my belly and strength in my body.
The only surprise that renders me bereft, even when logically I know it shouldn't, is how fast it is over. I sleep now with one fat babe on my shoulder, he twitches as he dreams, and he pulls my hair. I try to make sure that I somehow memorialize it all, but I know that is impossible. I will forget the baby acne, or on what day baby eyebrows and eyelashes grow in. I have traded my prior memories of raising two babies in my twenties, which now is a blur, with new anguish that for most of it, I have forgotten.
I had forgotten how soft (yet solid) my daughters' bodies must have been as I held them as they too slept on my shoulder. I had forgotten how much their faces searched for mine when they needed me. I had forgotten how young I was when I was their everything, and who that young mother was. She is now too, forgotten.
I sit in the back seat of my own car, the baby is next to me in his car seat. I shield his face from any wicked stream of light that purposefully seeks out his eyes. My eldest, her hair in a pile of golden waves on the top of her head, her baby neck too exposed, she drives us. Sometimes she forgets she is now driving an old heifer (with a fresh c-section wound) and her newborn son down the road. In her twenty year old mind, preoccupied with all things of being twenty, Coach handbags, and whether she should go to grad school as soon as she graduates; she flies over bumps in these Texas roads without a second thought. I chastise her from the backseat, reflecting to myself, about how I too used to drive like she does now, without the fear that sets in when you realize how fallible we all are. Her good-natured self, the ebb and flow of our mother-daughter relationship that is on that cusp of "old friends", she shrugs off my critiques, realizing how they don't mean a thing, and I wouldn't be her mother if I didn't boss her around a bit.
My youngest daughter, she used to be the baby, now thrown into middle child territory, she too watches me. And him. I am conscious of her scowl if I hold him whilst she describes the excitement of her day. When she was sick I asked her if she would like to come and sleep in my bed, she declined because "he" would be there. I said "he" could go with his father... and it could just be her and I. But that just hurt her even more, because her eyes told me it would never again just be her and I, that "he" would be there to soak up the bits of me that she so desperately needed.
Playing car seat Olympics with three children (one of whom has her own car, I might add), my girls always had their self-designated spots. Now I rearranged the spots, so that the baby is in my eldest's seat in the car. If I look behind me, his innocent blue eyed face is looking around, barely making a peep, in the place that she once was. I wasn't sure that it was supposed to ache. How does growing up mean equally both this sense of pride in how much she has accomplished, and the person that she has become, as well as the irrational fear that you hadn't done enough, hadn't appreciated every single day, hadn't been the best mommy that you could be? I don't speak it. I just think it, I hold this new baby, and lament that it all evaporates too fast, the time that you tried to trick yourself into believing that you had.
So my twenty year old, she comes to me, right out of the shower. She is wearing three towels, as one does, when you are twenty. She says "mom, you know I love the baby, and I am not jealous of him. I don't feel replaced. I just feel kinda jealous that HE will get to be with YOU for the next 20 years, and not me".
She will be leaving next summer after she graduates. I'll be like my mom was with us, "don't think of me, just enjoy yourself, do what YOU want to do, phone me if you need me, if you need me, I will be there". Now I know the whole time my mom supported us leaving, a part of her broke inside too.
