I'm still here, you know. My life whirls beneath my feet, children at all ends, and yet I am still not full. I will never be full. There are days still where I want to lie myself down at their feet, my four children, and let my tears pool around their little toes. I am so grateful for them. I want them with me, around me, on me, and I never want to let go. They are growing and changing and my family is getting bigger and older and I don't want to leave any of this in my past. I want to keep it here with me forever.

 Can I ever make this feeling go away, this desperation for a baby that haunts me every day?

When I was pregnant with Maeve, and Fiona was herself a baby, I felt somehow certain that this was it. I felt full, complete, and done. But that lasted so briefly.  Now that Maeve is growing older, I entertain myself every single day with fantasies of having another baby some day, one day. Not soon, as my life is most definitely full right now and my body and mind do require some break from the intensity of parenting a baby. But some day, some day far down the road, when everyone is in school I could, (couldn't  I?) conceive one, last, only child to quench my thirst for mothering the young. I dream about this every day.

I know part of this is a long standing obsession with having babies and mothering babies, but I also live in constant fear that I will never again love anything as much as I have loved having babies and young children around the house. As I am still in a stage of my life where I could conceivably have another child, I find it so difficult to willingly leave this stage of my life without looking back. What if it never gets any better than this? Would it be possible to extend it?

I could go on, and on, and on. Every day things happen that make me grieve the loss of just having a baby in my home. This is not a loss. I have had a gain. But still I grieve somehow.

In my mind's eye my empty arms are still reaching, reaching for that baby to hold. They still crave just one more, just one more. Foolishly, they think they can regain what was lost. I know they are wrong, but I still can't stop dreaming.