Wanting the fourth as much as the first

Today I held Lucy on my lap, she got my whole lap to herself, as I read her the same book from the library three times. Yesterday I weathered Callie’s tantrum over the hard words in her reading-practice book with tempered patience. She settled, finally, into the couch and into letting me help, and sounded them out. I finally realized that Avery needs that hour after school, alone on her bed reading a five-hundred page book about cats, before she can talk about how school was and what happened. It is unfortunate that her return to sociability coincides with the final moments of dinner preparation and nagging to set the table and Dad’s return from work and the baby’s fussy hour and Callie’s math homework and Lucy’s insistence on having her perfect-fitting pants rolled up midcalf in winter. But that is when she is ready to talk, and tomorrow I will be ready to listen.  

Today the baby pooped twice. A change from pooping twice a week to pooping twice in one day. Twice of the strip-everything-around-her-for washing and fill-up-the-baby-tub variety poops.

I hate when people say to enjoy this phase. I am enjoying the heck out of it. If I were enjoying it anymore, I’d be guilty of parent-of-a-newborn orgiastic gluttony. I never wish my babies would stay small. Hurry up and grow up so we can talk. Get big and interesting.

Today Avery, who has decided she’s old enough to sit in the front seat of the car all the time now (she definitely meets the height and weight requirements), and I listened to a story on NPR about a girl in Iraq who was kidnapped but denies being raped, because if she was raped her family — her father, her uncle — would have to kill her to restore the family honor. I almost turned the station, I did change the station for a minute, but then I realized Avery is almost as old as that girl, and if something that horrible can happen to a girl in our world, then Avery can hear about it. I told her we have bad laws and customs here, too, but nothing quite so heinous as a custom of “honor”killings. She wanted to know what bad laws we have, and I thought how complicated it is to explain, why was she pinning me down to specifics, but that laws should protect everyone equally, and when they can’t, they should at least make it so choosing is a hard decision.

The only time I want my babies to stay young forever, to preserve, not in memory, a moment and not yearn impatiently for the time they’re independent and autonomous and not needing me just when I desperately need a minute, is when I’m breastfeeding the baby. She can stay, her little head on my arm, the crown of her head in the crook of my elbow, her mouth a seal between her hunger and my milk, cementing us together in the most dependent and synonymous and neediest of embraces.

When the others want me, it’s my attention for a minute, my patience for an hour, my regret and promise to not yell over imagined injury of not having the perfect clothes worn perfectly for dance class. These are small pieces of me that chip away at my calm, sometimes it feels like each minor plea is an erosion, a tearing of flesh, a picking clean, slowly, slowly, of my weary bones. Must you take another piece, right now, I had just rebuilt, reclaimed that part of my leg you insist on gnawing off. I thought you had forgotten in your flight to something else, and now you are back to chew some more.

But Molly doesn’t pick or pat my arm or say my name in escalating tone and pitch. She wails, full volume from the start, if her belly gets to empty, supremely confident of her right to every atom of my thought and movement and milk. She gulps it down without restraint, forget the little prick here and there: she gorges on what my body makes, just for her. She grows fat and round and plump from the whole of me, transfusion of my essence to her creased thigh, no apology, no pretence of learning to care for herself, no inkling yet of making her own damn sandwich.

And I love it.