by gillian claire: a letter to my baby.

SOCIAL MEDIA

11.21.2013

a letter to my baby.

IMG_6584-4 .
oh, asher. it's honestly hard to remember sometimes that you actually, truly are two.
.
certainly it's clear that you are changing and growing. every day you make me smile in wonder with your new words and new habits. of course you are two, of course. but still, really, you are just my baby. you are wanting and whiney and you ache and need with reckless abandon. you still sleep next to me every night and you still wake up to nurse. you still stir franticly to find me and you settle with my touch. you are sweet and little and  still somehow keep so much newborn-ness lingering about you. i can't completely explain this, but baby is just a part of your aura. i see it in you and your dad sees it too; it's just there.

you are such a trying little soul, full to the brim in every way imaginable. needless to say, my days also feel filled - with lots of patience-testing and soul wrestling moments and darker thoughts of "i never thought i'd be this mother" shouting and crying and wondering "when will this day/this week/these hard moments end?"

i know that you ache too. you feel so much and too much and your little tiny heart just can't always hold it all in.

looking back, i see now how it has always been in you, always all along. the way you stretched your little leg inside me, reaching, reaching until finally i could grasp my hand around your footprint entirely. poking from my belly, a tiny perfect foot. a real baby foot attemping to climb his way out of my womb, fascinating. i see it too, in the way you were born. i planned a water birth all along, it's what i'd practiced over and over in my mind. but at the last minute, my midwife was still fighting uneasy feelings that i should get out of the bath. and so, as you were coming into the world, i did. you were born in bed, fighting and grasping for breath. a baby who just wanted to breathe too soon. desperate to do everything fast and first right from the very first day.
 .
sometimes, amidst all the turmoil and strife, i just get it. i get that you and i are not that different at all. and sometimes, in the middle of the night - there's just a fleeting instant where i feel it. we're both toppling about, restless in our sleep. i  pull your head to my face. i swear you still have some of that downy newborn hair and if i just tuck you in just right, i can still get a taste of that intoxicating newborn smell . your arm curls under my neck and your little baby hand twists for a fist of my hair. and we both just breathe a momentary, miniature sigh of relief. it's not a real sigh, but it's something.
 .
and in that moment, we finally feel what we both have been searching for all along in life - just to be loved and cared for, for no other reason than love itself. 
.


1 comment :

  1. so beautiful & sweet. it made me want to cry at parts -- tears of understanding, tears of joy. <3

    ReplyDelete

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