my friend said to me yesterday that someone she loves is a disaster. and i thought to myself, maybe we are all just tiny disasters. floating around in our little worlds. colliding with other tiny disasters. like people with saturn rings around them. with all our shit and baggage and self doubt and fears and insecurities just constantly orbiting around us. there are days i can feel the rings of these orbits so tight around my body. paralyzing. it's all so much bigger than we are. so we struggle in our own selfish ways to make sense of this life we are given. to create beauty in it. to obsess over it. what are we meant to do with this, our blip in time.
leo was sick a month ago. two weeks in a row. a high fever out of nowhere. i've never been very good at sleeping with my kids, though i had always dreamed i'd be that mom. small boy wanted our bed most of the time, and he wasn't hard to say yes to.
as i lay there, with his small and scalding body against me, i traced his features with my fingers. just as i had when he was fresh. when i would stare at him, obsessively, for hours. while he nursed, while he slept. i'm so fascinated by birth, creation and where these little souls come from and how they find us and why, or why not. i struggle with what the focus is. with the range of emotions and situations motherhood drags me through in a day. when i'm bedraggled and run down and can't stand another minute, and he opens his bedroom door for the 12th time, and i yell at him to go to bed. and as i walk out he cries "i just wanted to snuggle!" and you think, great. is life just about shutting them down, moving to the next thing. going down to the couch to wallow in the remains of the day and the anxiety of facing the next. he's 3. he wants to snuggle. so.what. just do it. because these are supposedly the beautiful moments, right? the ones we drag ourselves through every day for. just hoping to get that heart pounding feeling you get when your child sinks into you and falls asleep, or jumps into your lap with a book or holds your face in his young and innocent little hands and says he just wants to look at your beautiful eyes. the deep love of a child and the innocence with which they display it. when he holds my face in his hands, i feel my heart skip a beat. i close my eyes and make a wish. that some day, even when his hands are much bigger and rougher and i'm smaller and older, that he still look at me like this. and just wish to look at his mother's beautiful eyes.
these pictures are far from perfect, whatever perfect is. he's dirty and has ear wax and crummy fingernails. and every detail of it is important. to me.
these confused and emotional thoughts brought to you by : MORE RAIN IN NEW ENGLAND!!! YAY!!! (do they have a font for sarcasm yet?)
isabel