Transitions

My littlest, but somehow biggest bird has flown the coop, and I have graduated from the mama of a baby, a toddler, a preschooler to the mother of a full-grown boy who leaves me for hours on end and comes home singing brightly, spouting facts and delighted with himself through and through. I did it, I really did it. After a year of thinking I couldn't do it, I couldn't do it, I found the school that seemed like a just-right fit and I did it, and he is glad for it. I am torn, though, every day, because it seems so wrong to have given him over to somebody else for that huge, substantial part of the day. It is the juicy time where so much that is delicious happens, and I am missing this. What I wish is for a middle ground of sorts. Couldn't we have a really great school that runs from 10-2 each day? I would absolutely dig that.

However, for now, I am surviving, and my baby is thriving. It makes me so pleased and so delightfully proud to see him flourish, to see him skipping into his classroom and feeling safe and loved. Thankfully his school welcomes parent presence at any time so I get to be privy to much of what he does.

But I miss him, too. I miss him a lot, and when he comes home it's all I can do to keep myself from taking him up to bed with me, stripping down and just spooning his warm flesh against my body in an effort to re-absorb him into my being, to make us one for a little while longer. He was, after all, just born. Just born.

It is a big change in our life, this fall, for our family. Liam is off to kindergarten, Aoife will begin two mornings a week at our little, traditional nursery program where Liam went last year. She is itching to begin, and I will have 8? 10? more? weeks with a few hours a week on my OWN before newbaby arrives to steal the show.

I am floating here among the chaos of so much newness at once, of driving hither and whither when all summer long it has seemed that I have been so still, and so thoughtful, and so quiet. But I LIKE it, that is what is thrilling me right now, I feel delighted with how busy things are and how happy and whizzy and joy-full everyone seems to be. So we'll ride this wave, and trust that things will settle in time.

And I try, try, try, to maintain a positive outlook for the babe within, now 30 weeks cooked and with a vivacious, amazing personality. It seems cruel not to be optimistic, because this baby deserves all the hope in the world. I feel like I am less dissociated than I have been in the past months, perhaps because this little guy/gal has such a big presence right now. There is much joy to be had, I tell myself, and though I find it hard to envision I try to grasp tightly to the knowledge that it is true, it could be true, it is true.