I realized with a shock the other night that I was holding a baby who was no longer a baby.
My baby will be five in November. Five. She is still small for her age, and in my mind’s eye, she is even smaller. She curls onto my lap at night, and I rock her before tucking her in. I pretend to myself that she has not changed, not that much.
But of course she has. Hattie Belle is no baby. Neither is her older sister, who falls asleep every night with a Harry Potter book spread across her bony chest.
I watch as their faces take shape, inch closer to the faces of the women they will be. Angles replace curves. Personality half-learned from peers is superimposed upon pure temperament.
A new bumper crop of chubby babies has appeared. Photos zip back and forth across the Internet, in emails and on that funny, funny Facebook. Pregnant bellies, expectant parents, and then, swaddled gorgeous infants.
I see the pictures. Sometimes I see the babies in person. I want to nibble on their soft sweet limbs and cheeks, like I did with my own babies.
I was harried. I was exhausted. I was cranky. I was, occasionally, thoroughly miserable. The motherhood gig has never come easy to me.
But still. There it is, that faint wishing, that mourning of what will probably not be. I am 38.
Hattie, being small, is just now making the shift to a long, “big girl” bed. She’s been in her crib-turned-toddler-bed. Now it’s time to dismantle it, put it away. For what?
And yet, I can’t think of giving it away. Can’t.
We are funny creatures, we humans, in that we possess the dubious ability to miss what we never had in the first place. Our mind’s eye is often sharper in focus than our actual eyes are.
Babies, babies, babies.
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