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Three photo shoots in Connecticut this weekend.  My longest stretch away from the kids for work.  It feels so good to be home.

The walls are thin

Sometimes it feels there is no boundary between her skin and mine.  Overlapping like water over sand.  I felt it deep in today’s early morning wake-up, which shuffled my feet from our dark room to hers.  Head plunged into her hair, damp pillow, like I never left my own bed.  Thin difference.  Sometimes none.  Perhaps this is why parenting her can feel so hard.  I feel my own faults, fears, hopes, power, right below the surface.  Is it hers, or mine?  She breathes in as I breathe out.  Like the cord was never cut.

Dusk

And sometimes you just get lucky because the kids are fighting and can’t play alone, and you happen to have made a pot of soup for dinner at 8am.  So it was last night.  Henry needed a push, and he tugged me out into the milky light.  Sparrows ducked in and out of nests.  Wet grass stuck to feet black from running.  Fallen leaves.  I pushed small backs higher and higher, slender stacks of bones against my palms.  And breathed in fallen pears, half eaten by squirrels, fermenting the sweet air, while small legs pump, pump, pumped.  I have to remember it is nice to be there when dusk falls.

{Preview} Finding Stella

Long before Stella’s birth, her name came to her Mother, like a dagger – clear, unmistakable, true.  I remember Lisa, barely pregnant, whispering into the phone she was 100% sure it was a girl.  Didn’t need the ultrasound to know.  This baby already had her arms curled in Lisa’s auburn hair and a foot in the world’s door.  So she arrived, with a bang:  old-lady soul, tireless agenda, flashing smile, great purpose, and the unmistakable stare of a baby on a mission.  Stella seemed the type of baby you could put on the floor at three months and watch her get up and go.  Never look back.  Bowl you right over - forget about her size.  For Stella is as sweet as they come, but has that true, deep intensity.  Never ceasing to remind you every second of the day she is so much more than a baby.  I think some babies find their way into this world -- aren’t simply born.  Stella is one of them.

Happy Birthday, sweet girl.

And then, reality.

I was glad the rain came; it poured.  Lightening flashed like teeth laughing at the sky, sending birds flap, flap, flapping.  Their brown bodies liquid.  Clouds boiled.  Tiny petals shook.  Early pears thumped the ground. 

I needed the racket.  It thatched away cobwebs, and stopped my bobbing.  It made me take charge of this ruthless month of September. The month when it’s just so easy to want summer back.  The month of drowning, surfacing, drowning, surfacing. The month when you blink, and it is 10pm.  The month when it's painfully obvious your children are one year older.  The month growing becomes tangible. 

One week later, the rain is gone, and they are now one-year-bigger-kids, and I am a one-year-older-mom.  I’ve spent a lot of the early September quiet deciphering between sadness over the start of school, or disappointment I am no longer the mom of a baby.  Either way, both are realities we have to swallow when raising kids.  I just wish they didn’t come so soon.

Denial

Summer is over my head like a hood and I don’t want to come out.  We’re so far into summer I can’t quite remember the softness of spring or regime of school, and just far enough from September it feels like it may never come.  Puddles of pjs and cereal have pooled around the sofa alongside flip-flops, small bright socks, bathing suit bottoms.  No one questions pink lemonade for breakfast, or watching too much TV.  We sleep with sand in our beds, and eat peas until the vines are empty, feet still in the garden. 

I’m trying to forget that summer ever ends and that Jane will start first grade, her first year full day.  Or that Henry will go to school for the first time.  I’m lapping it up.  Staying deep in summer, lush with denial, flooded with flushed faces, bare bodies, beer.  For now it’s summer.  All day long.