Tuesday 26 April 2016

Lasts, longings and love letters to my babies

The saddest thing happened last night. You see, Leya used to do this thing; I would say to her, "What sound do crickets make", and with an earnest expression on her face, pursing her cherub lips, she would rub her chubby fingertips together. Last night I asked the same question - "what sound do crickets make?" - and she answered "chirrrp chirrp chirrrp".

It may sound like a small thing, but it was just one more road sign along the path of her vanishing babyhood.

This is something I have always hated. Both my children were born on a Wednesday, so while other people start celebrating the mid-week hump and looking forward to their weekend plans, I spend a quiet hour counting down how many weeks left until their next birthdays and the inevitable moment they start calling me 'mom' instead of 'mommy'; the split second when I cross over from being the central point in their world to a peripheral feature they have to remember to phone and who irritates them with reminders about cardigans and questions about supper. This mourning for their passing time literally happens every single week; it means that my love for them is like a pressure band around my heart and that every milestone has at its centre a tiny gremlin of sadness.

What makes me most sad is that, one day, I will pick them up for the last time and put them down again - and that will be it. And I probably won't even realise that this was the last time. It's kind of like when you keep hearing your favourite song on the radio - you sing along and sing along, not even noticing that the intervals between the times its played are getting longer, and then all of a sudden it's no longer on air, and you don't even realise until a few years later, someone plays it on a golden oldies segment, releasing a burst of nostalgia. Or, I look at Jessie - who at seven months is now closer to being a toddler than a newborn - and I wonder how that happened. And I think that, pretty soon, her tiny starfish hand will stop closing reflexively around mine. And then one day she'll think she's too old to hold my hand at all.

I guess it's an irony - in between the times that you're wishing bedtime would just hurry up and come, you're wishing equally hard that those perfect seconds - their giant toothless baby grins, the little hand sliding into yours, your pride when they attempt a big word and it gets hopelessly tangled on their tongues - would hang, suspended, forever.

3 comments:

  1. This is beautiful Lisa! I can so relate x
    (typed between wiping away big sobby tears)

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    1. Thanks my friend. Bad news for you is that I thought it would get better as the kids get older - you know, because the worst has already happened in the form of them no longer being smoonchy newborns - but it just gets worse.

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