Grace is ONE!
Dear Gracie,
Today, you are ONE! Of course I remember life before you, but in my episodic memory, that life isn’t the same one I now live with you. In a way, I think I was born the same day you were. I still look at you and just kind of can’t believe that you are here, and that you are, I guess, mine. You seem too real-deal, too larger-than-life, too perfect to be anyone’s, let alone mine. You’re just you, and you basically showed up on April 23rd of 2019 and taught me everything I never knew before.
You’re so observant, and you love to show me everything you find. You’re skeptical of everyone. You take your time. You’re sneaky, and you’re funny, but also kind of serious. You hang all over me until I pick you up, you climb the stairs as fast as you can, but will wait at the bottom step forever until I finally come to chase you up. You put your head down and crawl ferociously towards whatever you want, and you sing-song talk to yourself as you explore and make new discoveries about the world around you. You love looking out the window and being outside. Watching you look up at the sky melts me—you help me see things. You love animals, you love when we sing to you, and you love to hide under blankets and peak out to surprise us. I guess you’re a pretty ordinary baby in that sense, and yet somehow, you and your fellow baby cohort make this life and this world entirely extraordinary.
Ever since I met you, I wanted more of you, and I wanted to give you your own best friends to love uncontrollably, like I love my brothers. In December, it worked! I could already picture you as a big sister. I could picture your little blonde ponytail and your skin and your lips and your mouth full of little baby teeth—and I couldn’t wait to see you holding your new tiny best friend. But in February, I found out I lost that baby—really that idea, that dream, that timeline—and your dad and I were crushed. We drove away from RGH, and I can still picture sitting at the Stop sign on Portland Ave and saying, I just want to see Grace. Thank God we have Grace.
That is really the thing. For every ounce of bliss with you, there is a darker counterweight to that love—it lives in the contours and edges of everything—it especially lives at night. I catch glimpses of it and temporarily lose my breath—I am frozen by the thought of what I’d ever do without you. I couldn’t be without you. The feeling, the sensation, is so large it can make my head and heart spin. I have to get out of bed and open your door and peak in at you sleeping—your perfect, still body, like a little bunny on your belly with your face on your hands. And I’m somehow both arrested and sent soaring by it—I breathe a sigh of temporary relief that right now, I have you. What else even is there?
You have me craving more of you constantly. You give me just enough that I hold onto everything I possibly can for fear that tomorrow you will be older and bigger and closer to someone who I won’t be able to smell and kiss and hug whenever I want to, all the time, always. But despite always mourning the loss of yesterday with you, you make every new day so exciting. So good. Motherhood is this strange and comical mix of wishing for bedtime and missing you after you fall asleep. Just, it’s so impossible to put into words, Grace. There’s nothing else like this.
And, so, as I’ve said every day that you’ve been here, Grace. Thank God we have you. You are one, and you can barely hold a spoon or stand on your own two feet for more than a minute, but here’s the thing. I need you one thousand times more than you need me. I can’t wait to spend the rest of my life with you.
Love,
Mama