My Baby
7/05/10
“How's the baby?” my dad asks me on the phone.
I am looking across the playground at my almost four year old who is currently sitting and talking with a few other kids. He is my baby, but only the shadows of that baby exist any more.
There are some moments when he is unchanged. Those first few minutes in the morning, when we lie in bed looking into each others eyes, as we have most mornings since his first, I see my baby. Tired after a three mile walk around town, sitting on my hip, his head leaning against my shoulder, the baby is there.
But each day the little boy becomes more of an individual. So I try to hold on to these moments when they come, though I still don't feel that these four years of mothering has rushed by like people say. I feel as though I have lived a life time as a mother.
Baby? I try to remember concrete moments but the images blend together in my mind.
“He's fine,” I tell him, leaving him with some small observation of a change in my son.
I'm not trying to rush him to grow up, yet I am constantly excited to see what the next stage will bring us. At two he still wasn't speaking, I couldn't wait to hear his voice and learn who he was. Six months on he was talking with everyone, he had so much to say and to ask.
Now the changes are not as stark. Three months ago he would have hid behind me if more than two children wanted to play at the park. Now he sits “just talking” under the play-structure. These changes, they build on each other, leading us through the journey of being him.
02/28/2011