OK~ So a friends blog had this quote from this book she is reading. I am not reading it but the quote hit me rigth in the gut because it was describing ME!
"A mother's body remembers her babies - the folds of soft flesh, the softly furred scalp against her nose. Each child has its own entreaties to body and soul. It's the last one, though, that overtakes you. I can't dare say I loved the others less, but my first three were all babies at once, and motherhood dismayed me entirely. The twins came just as Rachel was learning to walk. What came next I hardly remember, whole years when I battled every single day of grasping hands and mouths until I could fall into bed for a few short hours and dream of being eaten alive in small pieces. I counted to one hundred as I rocked, contriving the patience to get one down in order to take up another. One mouth closed on a spoon meant two crying empty, feathers flying, so I dashed back and forth like a mother bird, flouting nature's maw with a brood too large. I couldn't count on survival until all three of them could stand alone. Together they were my first issue. I took one deep breath for every step they took away from me. That's how it is with the firstborn, no matter what kind of mother you are - rich, poor, frazzled half to death or sweetly content. A first child is your best foot forward, and how you do cheer those little feet as they strike out. You examine every turn of flesh for precocity, and crow it to the world.But the last one: the baby who trails her scent like a flag of surrender through your life when there will be no more coming after - oh, that's love by a different name. She is the babe you hold in your arms for an hour after she's gone to sleep. If you put her down in the crib, she might wake up changed and fly away. So instead you rock by the window, drinking the light from her skin, breathing her exhaled dreams. Your heart bays to the double crescent moons of closed lashes on her cheeks. She's the one you can't put down."
That made me want to cry! I have kept the rocking chair in Caden's room and demand he let me rock him to sleep at nap and bedtime and I still let him have a paci at almost three. Why?? Because he is the last and there will be no more sweet smelling babies to rock to sleep once he starts climbing into his bed himself and I am holding onto him so darn tight! I rock him long after he falls asleep just watching him sad at how fast he is growing up. Not a love bigger or better than mine for my other two just different!




1 comments:
wrap that love all in to one . . . . that is how overwhelming being a mother to an only child can be. every single "last" truly is that with no one behind to relive it and cherish it again. we all have different family sizes; either by God's choice or our own - but no matter the size of it - i never knew how much being a mother could break your heart sometimes!
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