Two years on....

My baby is grown.  He is a little boy.  Running,  chatting,  sprouting an ever bigger personality.  It’s a wonderful time, but my mind has not caught up.  I still see him as my little cuddly bundle.  It's only when I see 6 month-olds that I realise how far away we are from baby-hood.  He can still be my sweet baby, crawling up into my lap for snuggles from mom at those times when he needs a little recharge.  The he's up and off, going about his grown up business.

As I look back, I've learned a lot.  Also, I can't think of what life is about, if not this little family that we have.  What did I ever do before?  I wonder even, what was important to me before? It's like looking back into another existence, another lifetime.  I've learned about children, obviously, but I've learned more about people, life, relationships and myself.  

Seeing this tender life come up, I'm constantly reminded that the most important thing - the only important thing! -  in life is love.  How much time I wasted worrying about the pregnancy, how to feed him, what stuff we would provide him.  Now that I have had a chance to get to know him, to see what a child really needs, I worry less about the periphery stuff.  I want to give him whatever he wants, if I can.  But I know the most valuable thing I can give is love.  Whatever life has dealt us and whatever it will bring, love is what he will measure his life by.

And two years on, Noah is still in my heart.  I feel like I want to share that I still cry, almost daily.  Sometimes just a silent tear or two whenever his memory feels near to me.  I don't fight it.  I see it as part of my special role as his mother.  I will cry for him forever, missing him with every fibre of my body, like a pain.  I possibly miss him more as I see Ethan's personality grow.  I wonder.   I 'what if'.  I get angry.  I cry for his pain.   But that's the role I accept out of the love I have for him. 

Yesterday, after some celebrations, presents and cake, Thom and I found a quiet moment to light a candle and think about that day two years ago.  Two years ago, when we met our two little boys.  We just sat in the silence, watching the candle flame flicker, holding hands and letting the joy and sadness sweep through us for a while.  Wishing it could have been different and yet thankful.  Complete in happiness and broken in painful grief.  Two years on, and it amazes me how there can be two such different feelings at the same time; how I can hold such sadness and such joy. 

No time like the present

Ethan has been napping for 30 minutes.  I've had a cup of coffee, googled teething, then googled my dry cleaners, then played DrawSome on my iPhone with strangers.  Meanwhile, I have a psychology magazine open to an article about willpower resting on my lap.  Where is my willpower? Am I wasting time?  I have things I want to do.  Plant lettuce in the back yard.  Write a the next chapter in something that might one day be a book.  Read this article.  But then Jeremy Kyle is doing lie detector results right after this break, so....

The days fly by when they are divided into 3-4 hourly baby-segments of eating, playing and napping.  After the washing-up and a load of baby laundry, I can tell myself that an hour's TV watching is much deserved relaxation or that facebook is keeping in touch with friends, but we all know it's not.

As the days fly by, time marches ever forward.  Too quickly.  Some days I look at Ethan and almost don't recognise the emerging little person in front of me.  He changes so fast.  When he was small, Thom and I used to love a little squeeky sound he made, like a baby squirrel calling for its mother.  We would call back to him in little squeeks.  I loved that sound.  He's bigger now.  His vocal cords are bigger, too, and the squirrel sound is no more.  Replaced with coos and gurgles and grizzles that communicate so much more.  Wonderful, but also ever changing.  It's clear that if I blink for a moment, if I fail to appreciate each day, they will be gone before I have had a chance to enjoy them.

So , yes, I am wasting a lot of time.  And it pisses me off to admit it.  The thought of wasting time has annoyed me since Noah's death when I swore, in honour of his very short life, that I never would waste the life I'd been given.  At first, other people who didn't value the precious short moments we call life annoyed me.  But then I realised that I was just as guilty.  The daily drudgery bogs me down and I fall into comfortable procrastination.  I don't take opportunities to really appreciate other people in my life.  I watch Jeremy Kyle instead of planting my lettuces.  I guess I feel like there is always time, when the truth is that time is always shorter than we'd like it to be.

Why would I waste time?  I don't actually care which chav fathered the baby of poor woman on the Jeremy Kyle stage.  Watching does nothing more than provide an easy distraction.  Passes the time and fills my mind with something simple.  Jeremy Kyle is an easy example for all the things I'm certain we all do that fill our time without bringing us any closer to what we really truly want.  If I can get closer to what I really want, what's to stop me?  Maybe it's a little frightening to try for what is real, to love deeply, to live fully because the risks are so much greater.  The loss, the inevitable endings or failings cut to the bone.

So I'm finding it difficult to keep my promise and live up to this ideal.  Truth is that living the way I'd like is a big change, and such big shifts rarely happen spontaneously or quickly.  Today is another day.  The sun is shinning and while Ethan naps I can clip on the baby monitor and plant those lettuces.  Tomorrow I will see if I can keep my promise again, and for every tomorrow I am gifted, I can try again.

Looking back: love, fate and magic

Recently, our PC had some problems.  Thankfully it was under warranty and fixing it was a simple case of sending it off by courier.  A week later it arrived back like new.  Like new in every sense, including all out our stuff wiped and completely gone.  We were smart and backed up all our data before sending it off, so no big loss.  Just a few hours of my time devoted to putting it all back on.

It started off feeling like an annoying task, but I found myself caught up in nostalgia as I re-loaded the photos.  Photos of Thom and I before we were dating.  Before were married.  Before we were expecting.  Before we knew we were expecting two!  Blame it on the hormones if you will, but it made me well up a bit.

It is amazing and humbling thinking about the twists and turns that life takes.  It doesn't seem like years ago that I was working behind a bar, trying to earn a little bit while going to graduate school.  Thom came in for a beer, stinking like an old onion and dressed in high-vis straight from work.  I imagine he would have choked on his beer if someone would have told us our future then.  And I would have probably called the police to help eject the deranged wierdo from the pub.

How things have changed!  We became friends at first, and later dated.  We had tons of fun.  I loved the way we could make a fun night out of nothing.  Or the way we would dance like idiots.  Or even the way we would both want to slope off from the crowds at the same time.  He became my man, best friend and partner.  But even then I could not have predicted that I would be sitting here now, having just seen our twins at a scan today.  Him in the kitchen fixing the taps and me tapping away about our journey through parenthood on the compter.  Even when we started dating, this senario would have seemed strange and domestic.  But here we are.

I'll let you in on a secret:  Earlier in my life, I never wanted children.  I was always told by others, mostly older women, that one day my biological clock would kick in and I would change.  I did change, but not because of some hormonal ticking time bomb.  I had always been very clear on my reasons for not wanting to join the ranks of the pro-creators.  From a young age, I did too much thinking for my own sanity.  That and some unfortunate experiences made the world seemed a cruel place.  People treated each other badly and there seemed no limit to the imaginative ways human beings could find to hurt others.  It didn't seem like the place to bring innocent children into.

Now, it sounds like a bit of screwed up logic.  Things shifted for me.  Not suddenly, but slowly.  It's hard to outline here exactly how the transformation happened.  Little things, I suppose.  Stopping to appreciate life and what a gift it really is.  Love helps, of course.  I remember one evening, stewing about not doing well enough in some area of my life and sharing my angst with Thom.  I couldn't sleep and in the darkness my worries poured out like flood waters.  I remember the shadowy outline of his face in the night.  He waited until I was done exhausting every paranoid corner of my little worry prison and then in a calm, low tone explained his perspective.  How every person is a miracle, not when they do things, but just the fact that they are alive is amazing.  For that reason, everyone is valuable and worthy of love.

In the face of such logic, but also love, my worries dried up and I lay there in the darkness, stunned that I had never before realised this most basic truth.  I had been moving towards a more accepting view of myself and others, but that moment cemented something.

So my eventual choice to have children was not motivated out of some primal, hormonal urge.  I think it was more beautiful than that.  My choice was a sign of the greater shifts in my life towards being more compassionate, more open and more able to love and be loved.

I often think about the twists and turns of fate, the miracle of nature that we are having not just a baby, but twins.  In my quiet moments, I think about the lessons life has taught me and the gifts it's laid in my path along the way.  I'm thankful for learning about love.  I'm thankful for that stinky man who stumbled into my pub.  And in my most goofy, gooey moments, I think about that love like a little bit of magic that couldn't help but make not just one, but two amazing little people.