Five Years Ago

My, Oh, My, How Time Flies

Here's a little glimpse of our life in the days after M was born. She wasn't a great nurser, or more likely, I didn't have the hang of it. The thing that gets me about this video is the squawking. I have a hard time wrapping my mind around the knowledge that that is Maggie. It sounds like an exotic bird. Being poked with a stick. My Maggie sounds nothing like that now. Obie doesn't even sound like that.

Five years is such a very long time. Maggie is not a baby or even a toddler any more. She can read, she can wash dishes, she plays Mario games, and adores her family. She's grappling with the enormous ideas of religion and cooperation and logic and hunger. I very easily forget that she was ever this small. That she needed my undivided attention or she would starve to death or freeze to death or suffocate to death. I have forgotten how intrinsically frightening it is to have your first infant in your arms, even for someone as horribly confident about everything as I am. She was so small. And we loved her so much. It is amazing and breathtaking and so exceptionally normal to me now.

Five years ago I was on the very cusp of motherhood - a long sought after, begged for, longed for state. Today I can't imagine that my life was ever childless. After very little labor, very few contractions, and very few pushes our lives changed forever and it was all so long ago that I've forgotten how hard we had to work to have Maggie in our lives. I've forgotten all the waiting, all the sorrow, all the struggling. I just revel in each day that she is mine. She simply came along and gave me everything I ever wanted in life. To be her mama.

Thank you, Maggie.