The passage of time...

Me, at 26, with a living Charlotte Amelia (and some of my kindergarten students)

There is always something of a time-warp that happens when we have our babies. I look at Liam, at his sweet swoop of a nose, his fine hair like toasted wheat, his sparkling eyes the color of Boston Harbor, deep and blue and green all at once. His face, though I never would have known it at the time, looks almost just the same as it did when he was a wee little thing with tiny white fuzz on the top of his head. Yet his body is so long he has outgrown our bathtub. I think back upon the mere five years and nine months that have encompassed his life and I wonder how it could only be that long, and how he could have grown so much in such a small period of time.

But the babylost thing, that is really a time warp. Because if I think back six years and nine months, I was bursting with new life. I had a car seat and a stroller and a baby swing in my basement, and I had this big gift card someone had given me to BabiesRus and I was trying to decide what I'd "need" for my new baby. Perhaps one of those seats that jiggles when you turn it on? A plastic bathtub for the kitchen sink? A mattress pad? I remember going into the store and carefully choosing some Avent bottles, just in case. I mean, everyone with a baby eventually uses a bottle, right? I catalogued the clothes I received at the various showers, clipping off the tags (which revealed their size, of course) because I didn't want my baby's skin to be irritated. Everything got washed a few times in special detergent. Things were folded.
Six years and nine months ago I was painting stars on the ceiling of a nursery that would stand empty for another year and a quarter, even though the baby in my womb was almost five pounds. I thought I was ready, but I had no idea what I needed to be ready for.

Six years and nine months ago I had these three things: hope, trust, and innocence. Hope that things would would go smoothly, trust that anything that did not go smoothly would work itself out, and the complete innocence of a girl (and I was, at 26) who had no idea just how wrong things could go.

Leap forward, to now.

But look down as you leap, in between then and now, and see that year of time where I lived in complete darkness, where I had no hope, no trust, and not a flicker of the innocence that had been so cruelly yanked from beneath my feet in the wee hours one May morning.

And then look at me now, typing with babe at breast, with two more supple, long-lashed delicacies nestled beneath duvets under the eaves of our little pink house. The lunches are packed for tomorrow, the books we read at bedtime still sit on the bedside table, their little clothes lie on the floor of the bathroom where they were cast before tub time. I'm here, like a mother, as if I am just a mother of some children living here in this pink house.

As if there wasn't a time, a year that felt like a lifetime, where the house echoed with silence.

As if I had that innocence back, which I certainly don't.

But this span, looking back, makes my head spin.

What happened?

Who am I?