Monday, February 21, 2011

hazy thoughts in the middle of the night



i don't want to forget a thing, but i already feel my mind getting hazy in that sleep-deprived familiar way that comes on a morning with a flight before the sunrise. how you stay up too late in anticipation of a vacation and then the alarm goes off just as your nodding off for the very first time. how that feeling of lethargy creeps in, and you tell yourself that you would've rather slept than left for the tropics.

we are exhausted but overwhelmed with the love we feel for this little boy that i thought i knew.
i thought i knew him, after 37 weeks and 5 days of holding him safe in my belly, i thought i was prepared. ready. not just for the parenthood part, but for all the emotions that went along with it. boy was i wrong.

i feel like a sucker punch has come at me full force and knocked the wind out of my belly that now feels more like a water bed than a watermelon. that is hit me and curtis both when we expected it but didn't know exactly what to expect. a strange phenomena you don't read about in what to expect when you're expecting. probably because it really can't be put into words.

mothers for generations and generations have been giving birth and learning what a mother's love truly means. i have now joined that club and i can't catch my breath.

i watch his little hands and feet go. sound in rem sleep he flexes his fingers and curls his toes. his knees are bent up with feet flat on the ground, and i try to picture him inside of me, making those same movements, but there is a disconnect. the synapses in my mind don't connect those two things. the butt i felt for months under my ribs on the left side are his little butt cheeks that right as we went to wipe them tonight, he sprayed black tar back at us. this is a strange miracle. a lovely miracle, but so unbelievably strange. i pushed a little boy out of my body. how was that possible. i still can barely wrap my mind around what i felt and saw my body do that morning.

Friday morning. it has been burned, seared, tattooed in my mind as the hardest, happiest day of my life. i try to think of a day that outweighs it in pain, emotion, the swelling of love that comes from the throat, but i can't. our wedding was wonderful, but i loved Curtis before our wedding day. there were no surprises on June 17, 2006. But on February 18, 2011, i was not prepared. but oh so ready.

This afternoon he was unconsolable. After being under the lights for hours already, he was over it. he screamed sad, hoarse cried, sounding more of an old man who's smoked for 60 years than a 3 day old. so we decided some kangaroo time is what was needed. we we stuck him, under my nursing tank top, belly to belly and he immediately hushed. it was a miracle. i'm still amazed every time i hush him with my voice or my smell. it's an incredible gift i've been given. we've been given.

we have waited so long. I take a look at him and think, he's ours. mine. you've got to be kidding me that if his blood tests come back good in an hour, we get to take this precious little being home with us today. in a car seat purchased just for him. in clothes that were given to him because others were excited about his arrival too.

it's almost too much.
and i don't even care that i've been up since three on baby duty.
or that i hurt in places i never knew existed.

this has been the longest four days of my life, and almost unmistakably the best.
i have my best friend, the father of my son snoring next to me after keeping watch while i got some sleep, and three feet away, under psychedelic lights my son glows like the angelic little thing i still think he is.

this is the life, if i could only take off his little eye mask and walk him right out the door.

0 comments:

 
Template by suckmylolly.com - background image by elmer.0