Just Be

The other night, Cue was in a foul mood. Even after the full bedtime routine with bottle, story and rocking, he cried when I put him in his crib instead of snuggling his head against the bumper, tucking his little hands under him with a sigh and going to sleep. I was in a hurry and so I didn't stand and sing and pat his butt as I sometimes do when he's restless and cranky. I wanted to meet a girlfriend at a restaurant for dessert and I hadn't had a single moment of quiet time to myself for hours. I left him to cry a little, thinking he was probably tired and would be asleep in moments.

He cried for a while, but rather than settling down, he worked himself up into a little baby frenzy of anger and unhappiness. His cries went over the edge of unhappy to melodramatic fury. I trudged back up the stairs, picked his sweaty little ball of hysteria up and sat down grudgingly in the rocking chair. As we rocked, he lay quietly against my chest, but he was tense and alert.

I was silently irate. My mental list spun out of control. I wanted to finish cleaning the kitchen. I had emails to read. I had blogs I wanted to catch up on. I've been meaning to vacuum the stairs to the basement for weeks. They haven't been vacuumed in, well, a long time and Cue keeps eating cheerios off of them. There's a bathroom in the basement that hasn't seen a toilet brush in possibly months and I never read books any more and I'm not sure where my cell phone is and I have three years (three years?) of pictures of my children sitting on my hard drive unorganized and not in cute albums and I meant to call my sister this week and I didn't and I really wanted to meet my friend tonight to talk about an awesome project that she and I are supposed to be working on except that I Never Ever Have Time To Even Look At The Damn Thing and I spend all day with my kids but sometimes I feel like I don't really spend any time at all with them. I had this tight, uncomfortable feeling in my chest that I used to live with constantly when I was a lawyer who hated being a lawyer.

And then, I thought how about you just rock the baby for fifteen minutes. What one thing any where in that awesome mental list of shame will not wait fifteen more minutes. The inland Pacific NW is heaven this time of year. The light is gentle in the evenings and all the windows are open. There's the kind of breeze that dances in the curtains in the novels that I never read any more. The baby's weight on my chest was so soothing.

When I relaxed, he did too. He pressed his face into my neck and pumpkined (official term) his little bottom up into a ball below my shoulder like newborns do. All 22 pounds and 11 months of him cuddled into my shoulder like a tiny baby. He hiccuped a few more little heartbroken hiccup sobs and then sighed with contentment. There was no where he would rather be. My heart hurt in a whole new way because life doesn't stop for any thing and time keeps on ticking into the future. I am a mother to babies right now, for this blink of my eyes and then I won't be any more. They don't pumpkin forever. Comforting is not always going to be this easy. Gee and Ess will lie their heads on my lap, but they are done with the little pumpkin bottom. For all I know, that will be the last time for Cue too. I sat and rocked him until he was completely asleep, savoring it.

I am a doer. I know that I'll never be the kind of mother who is just with her kids, not easily. I spend a lot of my day trying to carve out a little time for myself. That's okay. I'm not going to add that to my huge mental list of mothering deficiencies. It's the way that I am. I have to be reminded and reminded to treasure, cherish, revel, breathe. To just be with them. Because just being under him in the rocking chair meant every thing to him. Clean bathrooms and organized pictures mean next to nothing.