Babies Don't Keep

"Cleaning and scrubbing can wait for tomorrow,

For Children grow up I've learned, to my sorrow.

So quiet down cobwebs and dust go to sleep,

I'm rocking my baby, and Babies Don't Keep."*

* * * *

I sent my baby with his dad on a month long trip.

Before he left, George was taking his first uncertain baby steps. Mostly he stumbled around like a sailor who was three sheets to the wind. He rarely left my arms. His favorite place to be anytime of day was on my hip or my back in the baby sling. Letting him leave for a month was a hard decision, but his father has as much right to be with him as I do.

Robert reported that the first few days they were gone, George wandered around calling my name. If someone was in the shower, he waited outside the bathroom door asking for me. Kitchen noises of pots and pans clanging against one another elicited a "Mama?" from his lips.

Pretty soon, though, I was demoted to a voice over the phone and he started calling the telephone "mama." His days settled into a routine of mornings in the garden with Lola, afternoons raising raucous with his cousins, and evenings being fed and bathed by papa.

This was my view of George when he first returned: peeking at me from behind the leg of his daddy.

A month after he left, my baby came home having transformed himself into a Toddler. No more drunken-like stumbling for him, this kid struts around the earth's crust like he owns the place. He runs, he jumps, he tackles. He has no Fear. He dances like nobody's watching, but of course, everyone's watching him. We can't help ourselves. He's just so great. With arms outstretched, palms up, eyebrows raised, and a nod of the head he asks me to dance right along with him. He answers questions and asks for specific items.

His babyhood literally slipped through my fingers. Just like that, it's gone. It started before he left, of course, but the change was undeniable when he returned. Swaddling has been replaced by snuggling. Cooing and gurgling is replaced by singing and shouting. Four times this has happened in my home, and four times I feel like it happened too soon.

With all the night time feedings and laundry and bodily fluids and smelling like rotten milk, I experienced the first few months of their lives in slow motion, frame by painful frame. With a little perspective (a.k.a. a few good nights' sleep) I look back and I think about the random arm and leg movements, the morning feedings with the eastern sunlight pouring over us, the breastmilk diapers that aren't all that gross after all and a hundred thousand other little moments and I wish I could call it up and live it in slow motion again, frame by precious frame.

*from Song for A Fifth Child by Ruth Hulbert Hamilton