the light gets in

My little boy, I don't write you as many letters as I wrote your sister. A consequence of your birth order and the limited hours in a day. But I think of you as much, writing you a letter in my mind I'll never put to paper: wondering who will you be and how you will be. How you are like your sister and how you are not at all like your sister. 

We are part of a weird club, to have been born and birthed this year of the great pause. I have so much time with you, yet sometimes I go a whole day without really seeing you. You are my barnacle, attached to my hip, we are symbiotic. The only exception is that last moment of the day, right before I go to bed and I feed you one last time. I stare at you, after the loudness of the day and after I've had some time to breathe and sip cinnamon tea. I come back to you one last time. Your face in profile, you don't open your eyes, you search for me without looking. Then that rush of love and bittersweet sadness. 

You have blue eyes, they get bluer with your emotions. I see my mom's and my nephew's eyes, your dad see's mine. You are a mirror of your dad, except in this one way, with the sweetest sweep of hair across your forehead. I push it back from your face, just like I do with your dad, and the completeness of that stops me in my tracks. You can give a look, my little god of war. I wonder if you'll have a temper like me. Your dad calls you his little empath. 

We know you well, our isolation this year has brought us to you in your babyhood. The sadness that your world has been so small, that you have grown just in our eyes, that you were only so small for those few moments and your family couldn't hold you; is balanced by the slowness of the pace. I have had the space to really see you, to breathe in the smell of you, to stare at your profile while the rest of the house sleeps. I miss you after you go to bed, I miss how you snort, I miss hearing Junebug say your name, and you laughing at her funny faces. 

So much of motherhood is bittersweet, and especially now with so much changed and time still rushing forward. I feel so much these days, like the birth of you opened my seams a little wider. I spill over. When I was a kid my parents worried I felt too much. They gave me a book titled "A little Kinder than Necessary." I think it worked for awhile, until you and your sister came along. 

Now the cracks are in the shapes of your names, etched all over me.

Letting all this light in.