Tonight was one of the rare occasions in the past six or so months that I've gotten to do the nighttime routine with L1. Since we do man-on-man defense now, I usually take L2 and M takes on L1. We bathe the kids together, get them dressed in pjs, come together for prayer and then break up into the kids' rooms and M reads to L1 while I rock and give L2 a bottle.
On nights when M is working, I have a different routine that starts out the same, but allows L1 some free-time while I put L2 down and then gives him all of Mama's attention after. Since it's usually a little later than his typical bedtime he's in that comfy, drowsy state and we pray and read and then I lay in his bed until he falls asleep. Sometimes he wants to talk and other times he just wants me to be there. Before we had a second child, I would lay in that bed, so tense...counting down the minutes until he'd fall asleep so I could get things done. Now, since the opportunity for that special time is so rare, I treasure it and lay there sometimes well past when he's asleep, just listening to him breathing and feeling his warmth next to me. I'm realizing that my little boy is four and soon he'll be a teenager and then a man, and I will have barely blinked. The incredible speed of passage of time when you are well is almost as disturbing as how slowly time seems to pass when you aren't.
We have some exciting plans tomorrow that L1 has been looking forward to for weeks. He was unusually anxious to go to sleep because he knew that morning would come faster that way. Still, he took a few moments after reading tonight to share his thoughts with me. After, he rolled over, as he typically does, and fell silent. Convinced slumber was nearly achieved, I, too, rolled over the opposite way and laid next to him silently, thinking.
As I gazed to the corner of his room that once contained his crib, I realized that was the exact position that I had faced all those nights when he was a newborn as I rocked him to sleep. I had looked at that wall through tears more times than I'd like to count or remember. On several occasions weeks 4-8 postpartum, I remember staring at the crib and willing it away, wishing it were in someone else's home, that I could still know and love this baby, but that he wasn't mine. The lump in my throat comes, even now, just from typing that. In at least two instances during those horrible weeks before I was adequately treated for postpartum depression and anxiety, I can recall actually verbalizing that I wished my son was my nephew. "I just can't be a mom," I remember thinking, "but I make a great aunt."
Tonight, as I listened to the sweet breath of my older son, knowing my younger son was peacefully sleeping in the next room, I marveled at, much more than I grieved, that memory. Sure, it still hurts to know that your mind was so ill and that your thoughts were so distorted that the very beings you now live and breathe for are the same human beings that at some point you thought you didn't want or couldn't be a proper mother to. Yet, all of those demons, all of those racing and ruminating obsessive thoughts, are now long gone. They are dead. But, my children and my relationship with them, is alive and well. I choose to celebrate that.
And just as I thought that very thing, L1 rolled over, draped his arm around my neck, patted my shoulder and said, as if he knew exactly what I was feeling, "It's okay; I love you."
He's right. It is okay.
On nights when M is working, I have a different routine that starts out the same, but allows L1 some free-time while I put L2 down and then gives him all of Mama's attention after. Since it's usually a little later than his typical bedtime he's in that comfy, drowsy state and we pray and read and then I lay in his bed until he falls asleep. Sometimes he wants to talk and other times he just wants me to be there. Before we had a second child, I would lay in that bed, so tense...counting down the minutes until he'd fall asleep so I could get things done. Now, since the opportunity for that special time is so rare, I treasure it and lay there sometimes well past when he's asleep, just listening to him breathing and feeling his warmth next to me. I'm realizing that my little boy is four and soon he'll be a teenager and then a man, and I will have barely blinked. The incredible speed of passage of time when you are well is almost as disturbing as how slowly time seems to pass when you aren't.
We have some exciting plans tomorrow that L1 has been looking forward to for weeks. He was unusually anxious to go to sleep because he knew that morning would come faster that way. Still, he took a few moments after reading tonight to share his thoughts with me. After, he rolled over, as he typically does, and fell silent. Convinced slumber was nearly achieved, I, too, rolled over the opposite way and laid next to him silently, thinking.
As I gazed to the corner of his room that once contained his crib, I realized that was the exact position that I had faced all those nights when he was a newborn as I rocked him to sleep. I had looked at that wall through tears more times than I'd like to count or remember. On several occasions weeks 4-8 postpartum, I remember staring at the crib and willing it away, wishing it were in someone else's home, that I could still know and love this baby, but that he wasn't mine. The lump in my throat comes, even now, just from typing that. In at least two instances during those horrible weeks before I was adequately treated for postpartum depression and anxiety, I can recall actually verbalizing that I wished my son was my nephew. "I just can't be a mom," I remember thinking, "but I make a great aunt."
Tonight, as I listened to the sweet breath of my older son, knowing my younger son was peacefully sleeping in the next room, I marveled at, much more than I grieved, that memory. Sure, it still hurts to know that your mind was so ill and that your thoughts were so distorted that the very beings you now live and breathe for are the same human beings that at some point you thought you didn't want or couldn't be a proper mother to. Yet, all of those demons, all of those racing and ruminating obsessive thoughts, are now long gone. They are dead. But, my children and my relationship with them, is alive and well. I choose to celebrate that.
And just as I thought that very thing, L1 rolled over, draped his arm around my neck, patted my shoulder and said, as if he knew exactly what I was feeling, "It's okay; I love you."
He's right. It is okay.
