While You Were Sleeping--Whispers From Your Mother

I think we redefined Lazy Sunday today. The front door, which is usually swinging open by 8am during the week remained locked until I left the house at 3pm for my coffee break.  Break from what, you ask?  I couldn't say.  Most of our day was lost in the Bermuda Triangle of Mad Hatter games, unending breakfasts and relentless tickle fights.

Now there are remnants of a most excellent pillow and blanket nest on our living room floor, playdough bits drying under the dining room table and an exhausted little girl slumbering, yet again, in my arms. I remember the day she was born, after she was weighed and measured, checked and rechecked...after the doctors and nurses finally left us the hell alone and I convinced my poor hubby to get some sleep on the sad excuse for a sleeper sofa in our hospital room.  I sat there looking at this crook-nosed, little being--so much like her sister before her, but with nearly invisible blonde eyebrows and lashes. I knew she was Bailey, but I couldn't stop staring at her face, whispering: "who are you, little one?"

There I sat for hours, etching the image of her sleeping face on my soul.  What else is there to do when meeting someone for the first time...someone who has been a part of you from their literal conception--formed with your own flesh and blood?  What is left to say when you find yourself unable to understand the mystery of who they are--who they will become?  I find myself in the same frame of mind every time this busy girl succumbs to the need of a resting place on her Mama's chest.  Who are you little one?  How have you grown so much in the blink of an eye?  Where is that runt of a baby without eyebrows?  When did you stop being a toddler and become a little girl?  Did it happen while you were sleeping?

She never answers.  She just keeps growing.  But I take comfort, knowing we are linked beyond the ties of mother and child.   I see the fire of my youth in her--the one my father gave to me. While Audrey is systematically testing the fence for weaknesses, her sister will knock down walls with proud brute strength.  So I keep this little Bear close to me--attachment parenting in the land of daycare and strollers--trying to impart to her with her every frustrated cry that I know her path--that she is understood. She is loved. She has a place.

And I tell her all this while she sleeps on my chest, growing into a little girl.  Will she know when she is a wild little lady, a crazy youth, how many hours I spent whispering to her sleeping ears?  You are mine. And I am yours. You, crazy, strong, loving child.