Witnessing You

I want to remember vividly how you cried out when I picked you up to carry you inside on this particular morning. You seemed to say that the winter sun is never so warm in the morning as it is today! I had to pee and needed to warm my cold coffee and I was finished picking the deck's splintered wood from your crawling knickers that I pull on over your sleeper each morning so your knees won't soil. Every tinkle of the windchime caught your attention, each flap of the pirate flag standing in the corner of the yard on its side from your party nearly two months gone grabbed your eyes. Cats figure-eighted in and out between us yeowing and leaving us draped in long, tabbied hairs.

I want to remember that we left the yard that morning to come inside to get warm and huddle together over oatmeal that smells strangely of bacon. I want to remember the nights that have passed since then, the ones where you cried all night-or most of it-alternately pushing and pulling me toward and from with frustrated grrrrs of teething and sleeplessness.

The business of having babies is not a simple one. I am here purely because of my needling desire to witness your life as only I can. I crank at how lack of sleep interferes with that process, of how my own proneness to grieving the passing present moment tortures me. Built up, these two factions find me tippytoeing on a tightrope of feeling lost in a jungle of wire hangers and madly in love all at the same time. I owe you an apology for thinking I would never feel lost once you got here.

Babies don't cure our empty, gaping holes and short fuses. But you, my son, make this life sweeter than my feeble imagination could have dreamed it to be.