never not

momenting

When I dropped Naomi off at daycare, she wanted one more hug. There are so many one more hugs, and I will stop and walk back to her for all of them. This time, she rested her head on my shoulder and leaned her weight into me. I steadied us both on the heels of my salt-licked boots—the snow still everywhere after previous week’s overnight arrival. I hold her and slow my breath down, will that pace from my body to hers.

Monday morning. I’m due to be at my neurologist no later than 7:30. It is 7:05 and Chris and I are both in the bathroom, using every tool in the arsenal that we have to convince our daughter to get up. She is laying on the floor scream/crying, refuses to use the potty. I pick her up and she is wild animal, alternating between squishing up her legs and turning them into noodles as I try to set her on the stool. She thwacks her own thigh with a tiny fist, inconsolable. We take turns trying to cajole her—we alternate between gentle and frustrated and raised voice and pleading. There is a point when we both have tears in our eyes. I’m in a flop sweat, dizzy in my coat—I have to leave but it seems ridiculous to leave in such a moment. But I do, because I have to, and Chris handles the rest of the morning routine singlehandedly, and she gets to daycare. They send videos throughout the day and she is clapping and smiling, an entirely different beast. I sit in my office and watch them on my phone, head in hands.

I take Naomi to the dollar store to let her pick out more ornaments for our tiny tree. In the store she wants to touch and talk about everything. So we touch and talk about everything. There is no need to rush. I hand her a star, ask her if she thinks it would be nice for the top. She takes it from my hand, gasps and says, “Oh my god it’s gorgeous.”

I stand at awkward angles over her former-crib-turned-toddler bed with a hex key and lefty-loosey every allen bolt I see methodically from top to bottom and side to side. This is the last “baby” thing we have, I think. This crib which we raised the mattress to and then transformed into her little bed. I take it apart and feel the heavy-float which comes with the evolution of living and raising a human being. Recalibrate, recalibrate. I question my own feelings: should I feel this sad? Or more, even? As with many mothering moments, it is a push-pull of internal arguing—is this too much or not enough? I swing from abundance to scarcity. My eyes water, but I don’t weep.

Chris and Naomi have left to see his mom for an early Christmas—they will be gone 4-5 days. On the first night alone, I shuffled from room to room in silence, crying over the quiet. Crying over her toys paused mid-play in the living room, crying over the bag of rainbow goldfish crackers on the counter and her drawing stuck to the fridge and her tiny sneakers by the door. I avoid her room for the time being. I’m afraid I will crawl into her bed and not come out. I stop in the bathroom and look at myself in the mirror for a while. I don’t give it much time at all anymore, the observance of self. I’m usually a blur in the background of tiny teeth being brushed, toilets getting flushed, in the dark of bedtime routine telling a story about Cookie Monster getting crumbs all over the slide. My face is still my face. I miss my daughter.

I have a daughter. Oh, how bones of fact can rattle you.

It’s not that I forget. Have you ever been so busying being that you lost sight of becoming? I consider the old woes of her newborn days—when would I be me again? Everyone is quick to reassure: you will, you will. It takes time. No one said what I think I needed to hear most.

Oh honey. You are you. You are never not.

Recalibrate.

Memory: Feeding her at two weeks old in the middle of the night. It is 1am, 2:25am, 3:46. To stay awake, I burrow into thought. I rock her and remember a night out years before—I went dancing with a friend at a time when I really, really needed to feel free. The room was packed and steamy-slick and some of us pulled our shirts off and kept right on answering the bass beat and trumpet bleats with our don’t-care bodies and empty hands; we had nowhere to be but right there in the center of that moment, and I can take that memory right now and stretch it forever. I could pull and pull and cover my entire life with its untidy gospel. I nursed my daughter and cradled the pearl of lived experiences one after the other as they came to me.

Adjust, surge forward.

Naomi has a habit of naming all of her dolls Sister, or Brother. Chris jokes that she must be running a convent.

When I look at her baby pictures now, I struggle to connect them to the stubborn girl she’s grown into. Or rather, I struggle to understand how we survived it. As impossible as it seems, we did that shit. In the everyday of it, some things are easier to forget. Once she moved like a current under my flesh. Once she fit curved neatly against me. There was a time I worried she would never learn to walk. Now her friends line up to give her hugs when I pick her up from school. Now she runs down the hall ahead of me. The only constant to any of this is change.

I carry her from the parking lot to the entrance of a store. She points to a stranger a few feet behind us and announces, “he looks like a grandpa!” Someone will stop and coo over her curls. She will want to hold the blueberries, and the blueberries will fall. The plastic container will pop open on impact and there is an obnoxious and beautiful scattering. My daughter watches the mess only briefly—her face turns up to mine, waiting to see my reaction before choosing her own. I laugh, because it’s ridiculous. I laugh because some blueberries rolled an impressive distance and in some ways the linoleum has never looked better. I laugh for Naomi. Sometimes a mess is just funny.

What is this about? I don’t know. I guess it’s just a minute in a moment of the countless sort. Life is in a barrel on a steep grade, and I don’t have time to miss these little things, which aren’t little things at all. These repeat hugs and spilled berries and dance floors, these bits of lived and living that I love and love and love and love.