How Time Goes By

As this pregnancy nears its end I find myself nostalgic over my older children’s baby days. They are both still little, yet so big. As when M came to the hospital to meet K for the first time on the outside, my children will appear to grow in the hours between when I kiss them goodbye and when they arrive at the hospital to meet their new sister.

My once small, lithe, boy will seem enormous and his eldest sister, already tall and solid, will appear gargantuan. In comparison, they will seem to not need me anymore.

Yet they will.

I will not have as much time to give to them and I will feel like I’m failing them. This will happen, I am sure of it. But we will get through it and grow together until one day I’ll look around and realize that my older kids have helped me just as much as I hoped to help them.

And even as they seem to grow up overnight, their baby faces will be etched in my mother’s mind forever. When I watch my daughter cross a stage in a cap and gown smiling in her own exuberant way, signaling a ‘thumbs up’ to her tearful mother, I will see her clear blue eyes struggling to focus on a set of plastic keys. When my heart swells as I see my boy wrestling with his own child, his voice booming with enthusiasm for the play I will hear my little boy’s constant chatter or see his chubby hand come to the back of his head to caress his own scalp as he nurses.

In a few short years that will seem long as we navigate them I will be laying in bed assessing my day and realize that I no longer have any babies in my home. And yet, there will still be three in my heart until the day I die.