Your second year on earth

On Motherhood: I ask this of you, but we both know my spirit is wild and yours is wilder still

Happy birthday, baby.

I’ve been thinking about the things I want to say to you on the day you turned two for weeks now, for months. The things I want you to know on your second orbit around the sun, the things I want you to remember, they’ve been whirling around in the background of my mind since you turned one. Every day a quiet chatter, a gentle pull of my body this way or that, begging me to pay attention, to hold onto all of it. 

I should’ve written it all down, every single thought, every single moment so that I’d have something to give you on this day that feels like the most important day of my life up to this point. So that I’d have something to give myself from a past that already seems light years away. Something to give myself of the present that is slipping through my fingers like the morning mist that disappears by the time I serve you your oatmeal at the little table we bought at a yard sale. We bought a bike that day, too. At the time, it looked worlds too big for you, but now, I look at it and I see how much you’ve already grown. I see the future pulling me forward without warning, without grace. All of sudden, I am there and you are there and I’m trying to make it all stop moving.

If I’m being honest, my love, my son, which I will always be with you then I need to tell you that I am scared. I am scared to lose you. I am scared that what we have now won’t always be. I am scared that somewhere, sometime, along the way, you will not know me in the way that you do now. I am scared because I have never loved someone with the whole of my heart like I do you. I am scared for reasons I don’t fully know. 

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In the morning, when you wake, the first thing you say is mama. You put your hands around my neck and say hug. You say, mama, sit; mama, read; mama, play; mama, carry [you]; mama, walk; mama, in—in the trampoline, the bath, your crib, the pool. Mama, with you, always, forever. But it all feels so fleeting. Every time feels like the last time you will ask me to share this life with you.

You are growing, leaving me behind. Do you feel it, too, or is it just me? Am I the only one who feels the passing of time like light moving through space at a hurtling speed that is seen more than felt? I blink and your face has changed. You’re taller and your hair is longer and I can feel your need for me dwindling, which of course, is the point. I am raising you to be confident and independent, to move through the world with the ease of someone who knows they’re loved. But I thought I had more time. More nights of you asleep on my chest. More days of you in my arms. More, more, more. I want more time, more you, more everything, but all I have is this—now. And all the nows already feel like yesterdays.

I want to be like the white heron in “Summer Poem” by Mary Oliver, taking one slow step then standing awhile then taking another, writing her own soft-footed poem. Can we slow down, my darling? Can we walk softly and slowly and write this, and every moment, in the sand so that we don’t forget?

I ask this of you, and I want this, but we both know my spirit is wild and yours is wilder still. We start the mornings slow and make tea and butter fresh sourdough toast, but then the sun comes out from behind the cloud and we see the way the room goes from blue to gold. You shout, Sun! Yay! in a voice that springs from joy and nowhere else. In the same voice that you’ve heard me shout the same words. We abandon the tea and the breakfast and the slowness and go running out into the yard to pick wild blackberries by the barn, to say hello to the finches, to touch each and every flower, calling them by their name. 

We blow wishing flowers and get grass stains and sing Johnny Cash songs until the water calls us to dip our feet. We go to the quiet river by the locust trees or the loud, roaring one carved into the mountains, flanked by rhododendron, or the wide one in the paper town that's shallow enough for your tiny walking feet. We go to the lake or the swimming hole that feels like ours, the one we’ve been swimming in together since we were still one. The water quenches the wild in our hearts and we stay awhile. 

Then we drive into town, what you call the city, and we search for music. We follow the sidewalks made of bricks until we hear a guitar, a banjo, piano keys, a harmonica—oh how we love the harmonica. One time, we heard a harp and we sat and we listened for a long time. Sometimes, most times, we dance. We dance to bluegrass and folk music, mostly. But sometimes it’s big band music and the saxophone solo we heard by the lake. How wonderful it is to live in a place where song always fills the streets. 

Then it’s home and it’s dinner and it’s the fireflies. Watching and listening, tuning into the rhythm of their flickers and sparks. My eyes dart from one flash to the next, trying to keep up with every blink that calls for my attention. Just when I feel like I’ve focused in on one, it disappears. I say look, look, and look there. Do you see them, my darling? My eyes fatigue trying to keep up with them, trying to keep up with you, and I widen my vision, stretching it to my peripheral. Pause. Look at the whole. The big picture. Do you see it, my love?

It’s you. Everything that ever was, or ever will be. It’s you and it’s us.