Babies Growing up and Mommies letting go ~The Last Day of Five

Today is the last day that my Bella will be five. It is the last time I will put her to bed and kiss her on her sweet five year old head. The last time she will look at me with her big blue eyes and ask me, “When will I be six,Mommy?” I know that babies are born to grow up. But must they do it so quickly?

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The Day before she was born in 2005, it was 70 degrees in Tennessee. Today, it was snowing in the Midwest.

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The waiting was maddening.I had no idea what was in for. This caption should read:Last missed opportunity for restful sleep!

Six years ago tonight, I was so anxious and excited, I could hardly sleep. A new life was on my horizon and but I  had no idea that I was about to welcome into my life the most important human that I would ever have the honor of sharing space and time with, sharing air with, sharing evolution with. I had NO idea what my baby would bring to my life. A love so deep that I can barely grasp it on most days. A fulfillment that I had searched for for the previous 32 years of my life, a void was no longer.

I had NO idea what to expect.This was the moment I was born for. This was the moment that I had waited my eternity for. But that night 6 years ago, all I could think was..did I deserve this?Was I good enough?Could I do this?Was I ready for this?What if I fucked it all up beyond recognition? What if what I wanted and what I deserved didn’t align? What if I was wrong? What if I didn’t know what the hell I was getting myself into? And I didn’t. I had no idea.

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The MOST IMPORTANT Moment of my life!

I remember lying in bed, on my back, listening to the stillness;staring into the darkness. Sleep was no where to be found. Only a million different thoughts, not the least of which was…I wonder what labor will feel like. This was the night before my very first baby was to be born into the world.I liked my life. I had the good fortune of marrying the best man I had ever laid my soul open for. We were happy. We had been married for 5 years and life was an open ended opportunity for us. As I laid there, trying to see our future in the darkness, I realized that no matter what happened the next day…our lives were going to be changed forever. The couple we were, would no longer be..we would be three. We would be a family.

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I'm exhausted.She is perfection wrapped in a blanket.

Tonight, as I put Bella to bed, I see the excitement in her eyes. The unknown. She knows that she will be six tomorrow at 4:51 PM. She has no idea what that means for her or to us. I’m pretty sure she will spend tonight the way that I spent the night before her birth day six years ago, lying in the darkness contemplating the future. Maybe not to the breadth and depth that I did, but she knows tomorrow is special. Tomorrow, she will have surpassed being that newborn that I held in my arms for the first time that moment that she made me a mother. That first baby of mine who came into the world and in that instant altered the path of mine for all time. She is no longer my precocious crawling baby or curious toddler. She has passed the  stage of being my preschooler. Tomorrow, she graduates from being my kindergartner to being my little girl. She becomes a little more like me in her thoughts and actions every day and in each of those moments she becomes more independent. Moving further away from my protective grasp and a little further into the world. And all I can do it’s let it happen.Because the most important part of parenting is knowing when to loosen the grip and allowing those perfect life changers of ours, to become the people they are meant to be in the world. This is how we repay the favor of them allowing us the gift of loving them.

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I was the most tired I'd ever been and I was also the MOST happy!

The moment a child is born, the mother is also born. She never existed before. The woman existed, but the mother, never. A mother is something absolutely new. ~Rajneesh

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This is what my heaven looks like!

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