I have been cuddling with Freddy most nights as he falls asleep. More now that he’s out of his crib. The bigger two, who were never in cribs and always in my bed, curled up with me as they drifted off for years and years and years. My body, as it rests with my youngest snuggled into the c-curve pocket between my torso and legs, has been remembering the feel of Maple and Eider in their long outgrown little bodies tucked into the same small pocket.
I have especially been remembering Maple’s little self tucked into me. My first. Once my only. It seems almost impossible to find now amidst all of her strength and force and unbound potential. That she was once so small. But my body remembers.
She’s been pacing a bit lately. She’s getting too big for her nest and knows that her time here with us is limited. As she walks her series of lasts, the year both interminable and impossibly brief, it is the tether that holds her to her brothers that is tugging her tighter and tighter. So many parts of her feel ready to go, and yet they hold her to them in this way that is only for and of them. I can see it. And I can feel it. But I’m not quite sure I can ever really know it.
She does though. Maple knows that many parts of her, and all of our lives right now, are turning pages of final chapters. The last moments when things are just so. But try as I might, I can’t remember the last time she snuggled up, and fell asleep inside the curve of my body. Some lasts are like that too. Bittersweet in their absence of awareness. Passed over in the everyday nature of the season.
I think I’m mostly ok with this lack of remembering. I just know that that’s part of the gig at this point. Perhaps this is why nostalgia plays such a big role in my day to day mothering. What I do remember, and hopefully always will, is the care that lives inside of most of these moments. Forgotten or no, there was deep care in so much of it.
Maple is taking AP Art again this semester, challenging herself with a 2-D concentration. She is using cyanotype, a long UV exposure technique, to reimagine some old family photos. The other night, she trapped me in the bathroom, as she does, and shared with me some of these big feelings. About being ready to move on, like she is at the end of something; but held here by the flow of life with her sibs who are both very much not at the end of something. They are in their middle, more and less.
Then she showed my her first print and it’s this image I took of the boys when Freddy was like two weeks old. Little ten year old Eider is holding him in the rocking chair in our bedroom. They are both so small in their own way. She added some feathers to the image so that it looks like they are in a nest. Her home nest. But she isn’t in there with them. The image is so beautiful on its own but inside the heart of it there is this sister’s love for her brothers even as she prepares her departure. Like this quality of looking back and looking forward at once. Which I suppose is the heart of nostalgia. Like the ghosts of all the past and future forms of my babies that I carry in and around me.
Sometimes I think maybe this sentimental longing is how I try to protect myself from all of the future grief. That maybe if I stay cognizant of the gravity of it all that when it comes it might hurt less. Of course I know the impossibility there. The fantasy. And yet… My little one that I lure into sleep nestled in the arc of my body today somehow interchangeable with the young adult applying for what comes next tomorrow. I think I will likely still see it in somewhat of the reverse whenever that day comes too. Another funny fold of time back onto itself.