Lucy, you are at once pure joy and completely maddening...
I just thought you'd like to know.
Joy:
Your lips--- so impossibly tiny in proportion, but with incredibly perfect detail... Your little pink tongue darting out to taste the world.
Your little newborn noises-- gasps, breaths, whimpers, squeaks.
The blonde fuzz on your shoulders, the downy fuzz on your cheeks...
That button nose: perfect.
The blonde line of your unexpected widow's peak hairline-- where did that come from?
Your thin, wrinkled old-lady hands, clutched in fists that find their way to your mouth.
Your smallness, swaddled in my arms.
Maddening:
Your preference to be in someone's arms to sleep-- as deep as your slumber may seem, as soon as you're set down, your begin to stir-- to whimper... and then to cry.
Your fussy latching, mad you can't eat, but hindering your own ability to get food by bobbing and whining.
Your tendency to take your long stretch of sleep as the rest of the household is awakening and getting going for the day. Can't you push that back so we ALL benefit?
The feeling that you'll never really have a routine or sleep in a normal place...
The way you only have the briefest of cute awake stretches... before it all becomes too much and you must, once again, cry.
The way you strain in your swaddle til it all gets shoved up around your shoulders, messing up a good wrap job!
*
(Warning: major rambling ahead... Just a journal entry, mostly for myself... Easier to type here while the computer is open than for me to trek downstairs to try and find my actual journal... You may skip this whole thing with my blessing!! Ha!)
It's Sunday morning... The sun is shining (hallelujah- no clouds for the moment!)
I'm tucked in my bed with the laptop. Lucy is swaddled in purple next to my thigh, my left hand on her as a way to reassure (trick?) her that she's being "held"... So I'm typing one-handed... slowly.
I'm listening to Pandora, set to cycle songs related to Alison Krauss.
My gosh, I love her.
I love this music.
I forget to pay attention sometimes, until a new song I've not heard before comes up, and my ears perk up--- the familiarity of a voice or an instrument or a style of harmony, but all in a new song... And I'm remembering to really listen. I'm remembering suddenly how much I LOVE this music.
Today, taking time to be slow and easy, REALLY listening, this music is filling me with emotions and thoughts and memories and yearnings... I feel my core calming down, and centering back to the AUTHENTIC soul I often neglect.
Within the second song played on this morning, I am crying-- moved, joyful, amazed that in just a few minutes, I remember the woman I spent years planning I'd become, and I am able to stop and look around and see that that girl I hoped to be someday is HERE, in small pieces. That I am not too far off course, even as I accidentally live life on "autopilot" much of the time.
Back when I was developing my vision for my authentic future, I dreamed of:
that farmhouse
a small garden
books
children
a curly-haired husband
music
creating art of some kind
a swing in a big old tree
fireflies
comfortable clothes and bare feet
a kitchen filled with light
wild fields
farmers' markets
family and friends
mason jars
quilts
black and white photographs
underlining lines of poetry
star gazing
tomato plants
dandelions
braids
tree houses
It feels like ages since I've remembered to remember these things. But this morning, with this music playing, it all comes flooding back, and I love that it still feels RIGHT. Authentic. And then.... as I look as this sleeping baby next to me, as I contemplate my messy ponytails under a sunny yellow bandanna and my patchwork quilt bedspread and the sun flooding this room... I am filled with a sense of wonder that the details of my dreams are finding their way into my present life. Even without the dream farmhouse as a setting for my "someday", I am somehow managing to make TODAY fit that vision a little bit.
Anyway... This probably doesn't even make sense to anyone else, except maybe my girls from 2000-2002 who were knee-deep in my ramblings of my "someday"... But it has been a powerful morning for me today, these emotions, these realizations... the feeling that my heart has been given a chance to realign to my dreams... And I am completely humbled and joyful that who I wanted to be is still who I want to be... and that I AM getting there... even if it is only in bits and pieces, ever so slowly.
I AM getting there.
And I am happy about that.
I just needed to write about it before I forgot how this feels.
*
For the record, I probably don't understand *all* of the ramblings, but like the bits and pieces of your "someday" you list, enough pieces of that 2000-2002 period have made it into other conversations that this entry isn't totally random, either. And it all sounds do totally, authentically Emily :) Love you. See you in a week!
ReplyDeleteI love the woman you wanted to be (are still striving to be!) and the woman you are.
ReplyDeleteYou and Mom are my inspiration!
I love that list because in so much of it I see things that I desire. Tomatoes, farmers markets, fireflies, a garden! Things that remind me of fresh air, the outdoors, and the simpler things in life.
I love you sis.
Hmm...I love 'ramblings' that make me feel warm and fuzzy inside.
ReplyDeleteI also love Lucy.
I just had to pop in and say that I just love reading your posts. You have such a beautiful baby girl there! Congrats!
ReplyDeleteIts funny, but the maddening section of your post is in sync with my own maddening son! :) Lucy is so precious and such a dainty girl. She is beautiful.
ReplyDelete