I've recently come across another busy mama's idea of childhood development: a journal of "things I don't want to forget". Initially excited about this idea, I thought a bit about it off and on, finding moments or developmental milestones I definitely wouldn't want to forget with this baby. Her cleverness, her intensity, her screams (Can I record that one? How about that one? How about her night time exhausted diaper change scream? Her poop scream? Her "don't set me down" agony? How about the one where she really wants that one thing and I take it away? You get the picture.). Weeks passed, and today I realized I would have to give up this dream of a journal documenting all those great baby moments for posterity. Heck, it's been 9 months since her birth and all we have for her is this blog and a birth story. And some pictures, sure (let me know if you want our family web photo site and I'll email you the URL).
This baby has been harder to document. After the novelty of the first, it's all about the journey. I'm finding parenting rhythms, activities and moods that punctuate days and weeks. Work schedules. Daily chores and routines. Changing needs and abilities (potty learning, bike riding, solid food eating, etc.). It has weirdly become less about the individual and more about the household. Which parallels her unattended birth - a normal pregnancy, hard labor, but a birth that simply filled our lives with its simplicity, changing us all again, leaving us a family instead of a child with parents.
It took me months of night-time adventures with the littlest member to get my fill of one-on-one baby love, the kind that fill me with her squishy skin and smell of her head and nursing and holding. Of looking only at her, guiltlessly. Now that she is approaching the last quarter of her first year, she is expanding not only her awareness but also her place in the family, changing its dynamics once again through sibling relations and mama nurture. I sometimes feel like a ship, all of us, at turns floating and bouncing and sinking just enough each day to make me try to understand it all somehow, in between trying to get it all done any way possible and letting go of the rest. The children just are. They just grow. I am dutifully their witness and guide, authoritarian ruler, tyrannical despot, soft lover of their souls, their mother.
Watching my eldest grow to choose her own directions, feeling like my own mother sometimes (egad it's bizarre to have to establish house rules), watching us innocently bump up against mainstream cultural ideas such as independence and growing up in young children, feeling like the freak in the room for not questioning our child's need to sleep close to us, have us with her, and snuggle or nurse when necessary. From the baby to the four-year old, I can find love anywhere it lasts, even when the words used to convey it are "I don't love you." Four is upon us, as almost-one is upon me. The baby sneaks in every day, but Lola is the noisy flashlight pointing frantically on every wall, looking for the darkness so we can notice how intensely she shines. "Now how dark is it? Now how bright is it? Now how big is it? How about now?"
If I'm careful, and remember to breathe, I look at the light. I see it expand as it gets farther away from me. I see the small round light shrink to the lens itself on the wall right next to me. I then see it disappear into nothing but an illumination of blood underneath the skin of the pointer, feeling no heat, seeing only the question and the quearant, looking for the source.
"Why is it red, Mama?"
Because, darling, you're full of blood.
