Do you find it odd, midge, that we occupy the same physical space, when our conscious beings are separated by such a yawning time and space and experience continuum? Maybe you don't. That's the beauty of you. You are, in my imagination, completely content while at the same time completely contained and unable to disabuse me of my ideas about your mental state.
In twenty weeks, give or take a week or two, that will change. You'll be born. You'll enter this crazy-beautiful world. It's a wild ride (do your momma a favor and think long, skinny thoughts for that first part). You'll be so many things all of a sudden, a brother or sister, a son or daughter, a grandchild, an American, a citizen of humanity, part of a family and just a baby, my baby.
That's going to be your blessing and your curse, you will always be not just my baby, but The Baby. The youngest. Here's a secret I have to tell you, peanut, you're not first, not second, not even third. You won't be handed to a first-time mother with stars in her eyes. I wonder about that, what it will mean to you and to your life to be our fourth child.
The "perfect" spacing of siblings comes up a lot in the media and at the playground. Parents put significant angst and effort and thought into the time between their babies. They worry about having the time for each child, being fair, equality and love and sharing bedrooms and dividing limited resources. I have to admit that your father and I didn't consider it that much, midge. Our motives were largely selfish.
I listen to the conversations, but mostly I've let these worries go. I remember the moment that the last string of angst snapped. I attended a mommy and baby group when Cue was newly born. The kind of group where happy, glowing new moms sit around in a circle with their babies and talk about life and sleep and milk and gas. I knew, in my heart, that I wasn't in that place. I didn't even really want to discuss the minutia of newborns this time. What I wanted was to capture some vestige of the light-filled, quiet space that is a mother with one tiny child. The sign said siblings welcome, so I went. Twenty minutes later, when Ess and Gee had wreaked sufficient havoc on the room and disrupted the conversation long enough, I left. I cried a little in the car, for the loss of that special time with Cue, but I rejoiced a little too. Gas and feeding schedules held far less power over my mental well being.
You won't understand for decades, until you have your own children, but I understand why, as parents, we stress about each and every small decision. The desire to do every single thing right is irresistible because there is nothing that parents want more for their children than perfection and rightness. We pick answers and call them right and perfect and the best choice and defend them like lions defending our kill, or maybe our cubs.
Co-sleeping is the answer to everything. Co-sleeping kills babies. Breastfeed. Baby-wear. Buy organic. Vaccinate or don't. Circumcise or don't. Our strong stances, our carefully-researched, well-thought-out, perfectly-constructed answers are mostly rooted in fear that we'll do something wrong and that it will hurt you in some way, now or later. We don't want to admit, ever, that children grow up mostly in spite of all of our efforts and that life is uncontrollable.
The problem is that life's perfection hides in its unpredictability. If it could be so carefully planned, painstakingly manipulated with organic vegetables and the right preschool choice, it wouldn't be life, it would be a computer-programmed caricature of life.
So, if there's a pro to being last (but never least), little one, it's that I've let go of some things (not everything, I have plenty of worries, don't think you'll be drinking pop from bottles and dating when you're twelve). I'm not the nervous, striving-to-be-perfect mother I was four years ago. There aren't any definitively right answers. There's no perfect way. No perfect diet. No no-cry sleep solution. No foolproof education plan. No perfectly safe plastic. There are only the best choices for us and perfect moments, greedily taken.
Don't see it as an admission of defeat. It's never that. Take it for what it is, a glorious freedom from the opinions and theories and recommendations forever whirling around this world, from the maelstrom of information that defines the age we live in. Because that's when you reach a kind of perfection, child, when you can be open to every idea, but bound by none. That's when you can take the best of everything and make something new that is yours alone. I hope you are better at it than I am.
Is it overwhelming? We'll be fine. For you, sweets, for now, there's only our way. You'll sleep with us until you are five months old when I'll hit my limit like a freight train hitting a concrete wall. Then, you'll cry it out in your crib. I'll probably cry a little, but not enough to give in. You'll breastfeed, if you're willing, but maybe not as long as your brothers. You'll spend a lot of time being dragged along where ever we go. You need to like sleeping in a car seat. Could you work on that? You'll spend more time watching your sister and brothers play and less time playing with me than you probably should.
It's not perfect. Sometimes, it's barely marginal. But, it's ours.
Someone pretty cool once sang, "All you need is love." I think you will find that's not altogether true. I don't want to lie to you. Some day, you'll probably need other things, like peanut butter and chocolate and occasionally alcohol. What is true though, what I find, thirty-six years into my so called life, is true, is that the more people that love you, effortlessly, unconditionally, deeply love you, the better off you are.
Baby mine, if that's the universal truth, you are golden.
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Week Twenty. Yes, I am wearing a vest in the house. It's freezing. Funnily enough, if you blow up that cropped shot, you can see a picture of me at 38 weeks with Quinn in the background.
I just like these. See, they sometimes get treats, when I stage it for the blog.
*Oh, I know, gag, but that's what happened in my head. Five points for the reason for that annoying nickname.
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