Toothsome

I don’t remember what The Poo was like when she was teething.

In fact, I find that I can barely remember what she was like as an infant at all. Her first Christmas came and went, made remarkable only by the 6-inch fresh scar on my abdomen and the shell shock of newborn nights.

When did she smile? When did she roll over? Where and when did she get her first tooth? I just don’t know.

And it isn’t that I wasn’t paying attention. My every fibre was dedicated to mothering her—to the point that was unhealthy for us both. And when I wasn’t mothering, I was mourning.

I wonder sometimes if her anxiety issues don’t stem from that fact that I spent the first half of my pregnancy waiting for my father to die, and then the remainder grieving for the loss.

I’ll never know.

What I do know is that now, with Shaggy, the days and nights of his babyhood are whizzing past very quickly. At the Thanksgiving table, I stuck my fingers into his mouth absently, letting him chew, and then pulled them back out with a hiss.

“He bit me!” I said. “He has teeth! Two!”

And so he does.

Suddenly he is pulling himself up into a furious crunch every time we lay him down, and he trains his laser beam of a smile on every face he meets. He laughs and flirts and generally steals hearts all the way from Illinois to Virginia, and in all the states in between.

He is such a little love.

I am trying hard not to wish this time away. I am trying to savor every second of this, my last chance. The last of my firsts—sitting up, solid foods, crawling—all of it.

It is difficult in the heart of the night, when my bones nearly ache with exhaustion and the daily grind makes me weak. I want to snap and fuss, and sometimes, I do.

But then I pull his soft fuzzy head into my neck and think:

Just breathe.

Just wait.

Remember.

Slow down.

And so I do. And I come here, and I write and I record and I put in place a series of words that will forever remind me of this time, for better or for worse.

But mostly, I think, for the better.

Happy 2009, my friends, and may we all remember to just breathe.

***

Photo by my talented sister.