She Laughs at the Days

Dear Boy,



Twelve years ago today you made me a mother. It didn't go at all as I had planned, and dreamed about, your birth, but there you were anyway, with a ridge in your forehead and a cone on the back of your head, and so, very, very fragile and small.

For months I had to sleep facing you. My heart just couldn't take the uncertainty of facing the other way, of not watching you sleep and knowing you were ok. My heart filled up with so many feelings when I looked at you. Sometimes they spilled out of my eyes and squeezed my chest so tightly as it learned just how much love it could hold for another person.

I would creep into the bedroom if you slept longer than an hour and put my hand on your chest, just to make sure that you were still breathing.

I learned everything about being a mom with you. I am still learning. I've never parented a 12 year old before, and you've never been a twelve year old and this year is a whole brand new thing to learn and figure out togethe…

I didn't realize, until I put up that last post about Dek, that it had been a full month since I last posted anything here in this space.

Time really moves differently here. Days move slowly, and less happens in them, which I think ends to the melding of all of them together into a continuous blur and I look up weeks later and say, "What, it's October? I don't even remember September."

Some of that has to do with the oddness of the seasons, that I'm not used to, so I have no feeling of the passing of time from the weather.

So there's that.

And there's also the crazy business of those long slow days with the laundry, and the schooling, and the parenting, and the walks to the little store for dinner ingredients, and the never ending dishes, and the baby, who needs holding and feeding, and the desperately trying to stay awake long enough in the few moments every day that I have to sit down and write all the work things I have to write, and then still fin…

Dear little Dek,

You are already 4 months old and this is the first letter I am getting around to writing to you.

In my defense, you are a very particular little short person and you often only want to be held, but any old baby holder will not do. No, it must be mama who holds you. Big brothers and sisters will be tolerated for extremely brief periods of time. You will submit to being held by daddy if you aren't tired, or hungry, and don't have any gas, or any other discomfort of any kind. But if you wake up cranky and he comes in to pick you up, you actually yell louder, as if to say, "Not you! I don't want you you great hulking hairy man with scratchy whiskers and a loud scary voice. Bring me that woman with the milk boobs. I will only have her."

We submit to your tyranny, because you are just super adorable when you aren't really angry that I'm not holding you. To be clear, it is just holding that you want when you do this. Daddy will hand you over as …