Oh, hello old friend. Fancy seeing you here. I know I haven’t been around in a while. It’s not that I don’t want to. In fact, the exact opposite. There’s not too many a day that pass by where I don’t have an idea that comes into my head that I want to take here to transmit to the rest of the world. Except, once I have the “time” to put that idea down there is something that stops me. Like, writing up lesson plans for the next day, completing art projects, convincing the Jude to sleep/shower/put on underpants, brief and wonderful dances with that thing we used to call sleep. I don’t necessarily feel busy, but maybe I am. I get to do this job where I work with these really beautiful and wonderful and infuriating young people that I love, and I get to spend the vast majority of the day knee deep in cuddles and giggles and drool and poop.
It’s not bad.
But, I guess it doesn’t give me a whole lot of wiggle room. The Jude, in finding himself as a toddler and therefore and adult, tells me more about life every day. Lately, when I find myself having to take toys that are thrown at the baby or food that has been smushed into everywhere, he pushes out his lip and says to me, “Mama, you just broke my heart.” And it breaks my heart. I imagine him with his lover far far faaaaarrr in the future and I almost pity the person. He’ll be like his father. Too charming. Too silly. Absolutely beautiful and special, and they will be so deeply in love that any indiscretion he commits will be automatically forgiven. I imagine that he may break some hearts.
The baby princess is now noisy. She sits on her own and chirps her morning afternoon and evening songs until someone presents her with whatever her chirpy little mouth desires. Her chubby rolls are lasting and get coos and smiles everywhere we go. I like to kiss them while her scratchy little paws pull out clumps of my hair.
My heart feels sort of torn. Everyone says that when you have more than one little person gripping at you day and night your love is not divided, but multiplied. I think of this saying a lot. I feel like my love is multiplied. In fact, I feel this overflowing of love. This strange happiness follows me everywhere and makes me believe that only good things will happen from here on out. But, I still feel like I’m gypping one kid when I do not slather this abundance of love all over them and instead dividing it up between them. There is more love, but it is still divided. Like, when we go to bed. Sweet baby D goes down around 8:30. We snuggle and we nurse and she’s out within about five minutes. Snuggled up around her little chubby baby body and smelling her little pheromone head and breathing in cadence with her short baby breaths without fail sends me into the first phases of the REM cycle. And then, without fail, Jude comes with pitter patter toes and a three year old voice and three-year-old bouncing feet and even when I start to send some kind of prayer plea desperate cry to the universe he jumps up into the bed and on my head. At this moment my love feels divided. I feel like I want to stay curled up with baby D and warm and dream about mermaids and pizza all night, and I want the three year old Jude to climb into his own bed and settle in and just go to sleep.
It is at this moment that I usually cry. I cry those real desperate oh-my-god-what-have-I-done-this-is-not-life tears. Then I slide my arm out from under baby D, and I rub my eyes, and I entertain and brush teeth and read books and finally finally finally lay my head down beside him. And then, we cuddle up, and before bed he rubs his nose on mine, for snuzzies, and love is multiplied once again.
pumpkinblossoms 