Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Little Man has a sibling. I know! I'm as surprised as anyone. It's the weirdest thing... I was just trying to catch up on some stuff, you know, dishes and whatnot, and suddenly, kaboom! There was a newborn baby in the house, all wiggly and cute and asking to be fed, diapered, held, you know -- mothered. And I looked at myself and said, Oh, hey, I'm a mother! I could take this on! And so I did. And so there was Littler Man.

OK, it didn't happen exactly like that. But it sort of feels as if it did. Actually, there was a tremendous amount of effort involved. And I don't mean the regular baby-making kind of "work." I mean the sort of expert work performed by teams of fertility specialists; and also the emotional work performed by people who generously, incredibly, donated their own embryonic children to us. Some of those embryonic children took one look at the inside of my uterus and said "Um, no. Thanks, though" and left. One of them, though, hung on for a bit, checked it all out, listened to the sound of my voice, muffled as it was through all those internal organs, the breathing and the heartbeat and the gushing of blood through my veins, and said "She sounds nice. I'll bet she'll be OK for me" and took a leap of faith.

For which I am tearfully grateful, even though I sometimes wonder if either he or we are crazy. Are we ready for this? A whole 'nother baby-raising time, after Little Man has already graduated into schoolkid-dom, all making his own snacks and deciding on his own hairstyles and writing his own poems? And at 4:00 a.m., when Littler Man wants to be fed AGAIN after JUST FEEDING an HOUR BEFORE, I do wonder what in tarnation I was thinking. But then we get up in the morning and sit in the chair by the window, and it's quiet and there's a funny early morning light, and I hold him against me with his feather-soft head just under my chin, and his heartbeat humming against mine, and he snuggles all comfortable-like against me, palpably content, and I nod.

Yes. Oh yes.