Since I’ve got my hands full right now, we’re being treated to guest posts! Today’s is from Diana Duke. Welcome, Diana!
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Someday, it’ll be about a boy.
Today, it’s about a nap. Again. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard the phrase, “I not tired!” but I know it always brings us, with kicking and tears, to this moment: K and I on her bed, her hot, tear-streaked skin under my fingers as I stroke her gently while whispering that it’s going to be okay. We lay side-by-side, having recently passed the point of stand-and-sway comfort.
I’ve been thinking about beginnings a lot lately, what with M starting kindergarten and K starting preschool and time marching relentlessly onward into uncharted territory. I’m a creature of nostalgia, clutching at every moment—even this one—with greedy fingers. Don’t take this from me, I tell time, as obstinately as my three-year-old fights her nap. But the truth is, time, like exhaustion, is its own master.
Beginnings have always been to me like an involuntary change of clothes. Let me take this old thing, replace it with something perfectly new. And time ripped that old thing—the comfortable, warm and worn old thing—and stuck me with something awkwardly stiff. New. Unfamiliar. I cried at the loss, I balked at the new. Then slowly, that too became familiar. Worn through until it also needed to be replaced.
But as I sit with K, her eyes gently closing, I look ahead. I realize that someday we’ll be doing this very same thing in nearly the same place. Then, it’ll be about a boy. Or a friend. Or a test. It will be about something else, something more grown-up, but still the same comforting, the same tears. The same moment shared together, not unlike those times we once rocked to sleep together, singing soft songs as I nursed.
Maybe I’ve had it wrong. Seeing these moments piled one on top of another, it seems less like a sudden costume switch-a-roo and more like a jacket. Another layer placed over the old. That past, it’s still there, tucked underneath. I can peel up the new and see what came before. Feel it, remember it through my mind and our conversations and the countless pictures, close my eyes and walk through those spaces once more. It’s not gone, even though a look in the mirror might tell me otherwise. It’s just not the current ensemble.
Those people who are growing before my very eyes, they too are building layer upon layer. In there somewhere is that little baby grabbing my finger, the toddler who couldn’t walk, the four-year-old fireman. Even when they are tall, even when they look and sound and act nothing like those earlier incarnations, those little people are buried underneath, like the round little core of an onion.
Each beginning is another coat—unfamiliar, yes, but only until I learn to enjoy it. The more coats I have, the more I’ve experienced. In the end, I hope all these coats will turn me, someday, into an elderly stay-puff marshmallow woman, kept warm by the many many layers my life has laid upon me.
For now I settle into it, this new beginning, stretching at the shoulders and bunching at the waist. I lay my head down next to K’s and listen to her slowly relaxing breaths, a thread that runs consistent. We are lucky to be here, lucky to be blessed with another addition. Nothing—not even time itself—can take that away from me.
Diana Duke is a write-at-home mom from San Diego, CA. In addition to raising small children, she blogs regularly, and occasionally manages some actual fiction and nonfiction too.
