There are moments in time I’d like to freeze as my children are growing up so fast. One tells me I’m the mayor of Crazy Town (in our household it’s a real place) the other asks me such interesting questions about the Mir space station and will Steve Harvey ever host a Miss America pagent again?
I still remember when they were babies and the circumstances that led up to me bringing them into the world. One two days late and long and skinny and purple as Barney the dinosaur. The cord was wrapped around his neck and his head was too wide to engage down into the birth canal. He had the brightest eyes and watched my every move as fascinated with me as I was with him. Oh how I loved him I knew he was waiting for me all along.
I have to pause that moment when he squeezed my finger and looked up into my eyes as it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Now he’s 4″8 and soon will be height at nine years old and towering over me by the time he’s licenced to drive. His little brother made his scary and rapid appearance before I had a chance to prepare for it. I knew nothing about early onset labor and all that will follow having a premature baby.
I have to press play on my memory bank as those two weeks of having my baby in the hospital NICU are a blur of emotions. He came into the world sleeping the OBGYN actually woke him up as he cut him out of me and lifted him over top of the blue sheet. He was like a little loaf of bread all curled up and he made this meowing sound and I burst out laughing. I looked at my husband and said “did our baby just meow?”
Then the whole OR started laughing and it broke the thick as ice tension with the seriousness of my son’s early arrival. He was such a mystery to me and didn’t open up his eyes for five days. Then when he did I felt like I could see all the wonders of the world. My baby had an old soul and he looked at me as if to say it’s ok Mom I’ve done this before.
The love I had in that moment enveloped me like a warm mist floating through me and all around as I was lost in the swirling rainbow of emotions. I have to pause that moment in time as everything I read about Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet came flooding back to me.
Your children are not your children.
They are sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not of you.
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
For such a young little life he had this wisdom about him and I was captured by it. When we brought him home he completed our family with his gentleness. It took him two more weeks to find his voice as he was quiet and serious. It was like he was taking every moment in of his new world and didn’t want to miss a minute of it to sleep. We settled into our family of four and I went into grief recovery as my Mom had died five weeks prior to my baby’s birth.
I felt so much guilt because I loved her so much I couldn’t hold onto my pregnancy. I wanted to pause the last moment I had with her as I told her we were expecting again. The warmth in her hands as she squeezed mine, and the glow in her eyes was my most cherished moment with her.
I know she watches over my children and wants our greatest gift to be our happiness. Cuddling with my husband while watching our kids entertain us with their antics these are the moments I’d love to pause and hold them in their youth a little longer.
This had been my Stream of Consciousness Saturday with Linda G Hill as part of Just Jot January posting everyday for the month. Today’s prompt was the word pause.
