It's not that I have nothing to say.

It's that I have too much to say. And it keeps swelling in my head and I sit in my car mentally writing blog posts, but then I can't seem to put pen to paper (or hands to keyboard, as it were). I've had so much on my mind lately, both trivial little things like wanting to talk about how Luca amazed us with potty training so easily and heavy introspective things about marriage and kids and love and life. But I bore myself before I even start to write, so I wonder...won't I bore anyone reading this as well?

And then I realize...blogging is so self-involved and self-indulgent anyhow. So I may as well write about whatever strikes me, right?

I went back to work 2 weeks ago, after a long maternity leave that was most decidedly MUCH too short. I know I just contradicted myself, but it was longer than my leave after Luca was born (6 weeks) and yet too short for my tastes, so the contradiction makes sense.

It hit me last night, when I was holding Rohan on the yoga ball, bouncing him into droopy-eyed bliss, how much I just want to stay home and absorb every second of my kids. His little right hand was up on my chest, gripping at the edge of my shirt; his left hand pressed to his cheek. And then there it was: that moment moms live for, when full-bellied contentedness lulls their baby into sleep. The split second in time when baby's arm goes limp and drops down to the side and the pacifier pops out of baby's mouth (much like the red button signifies the turkey is done) and they drift into baby dreamland. What must it be like in the dreamland of a baby, whose mind is unburdened by the nasty and ugly and evil of the world? Puppy dogs and milk and rainbows and more milk. Fields of soft green blankets with streams of milk running through them, and Mama and Dada smiling in the sky, like that creepy baby-sun on Teletubbies only NOT creepy because babies love that kind of thing. Because to a baby, mom and dad may as well BE the sun since the world revolves around them. I love that moment for the calm it brings...the softening of Rohan's brows (he, like his mom, has very expressive brows that are always in action when he's awake), the pouting of the lower lip, the plumpness of the cheeks. Since she was little, I've always said Luca asleep is all eyelashes and cheeks and lips. Well her little brother is shaping up to be much the same...those lashes that curl just so and the lips that pout and puff and the cheeks, so edibly sweet and perfect like little apricots. I have to resist rubbing my lips against his cheeks once he falls asleep and they go slack, for fear it will wake him. But when he's not asleep, all bets are off and those cheeks get nuzzled and nibbled more times a day than I could begin to count.



So last night this perfect storm of baby sweetness occured as I was bouncing with Rohan, and it hit me like a punch to the stomach. All the sudden my throat got thick and I could taste the bitter sadness of missing the hell out of my baby. I started to tally it up in my mind, the number of times I will have to miss this moment...this instant in time when Rohan slips easily from awake to dreamy in my arms. It's just a small thing...a mere few seconds that may go unnoticed by anyone else, but it's the little things that end up being the biggest. It's the feeling of warm baby cheek against skin, of breaths slowing into sleepy regularity, of a tiny baby body going limp with complete faith in the arms holding it that I know I will miss the most as he gets older. It burns at my eyelids and my heart feels a little squeezed, and I sit and cry as I bounce him on the ball, resigned to the fact that I am working so he and Luca can have a good life (and, honestly, a roof over their heads...I'm not buying Prada with my paychecks!) and I know the trade off is the moments I will miss, stacked up into piles of guilt and bitterness and hot in my throat.