Dear Clara

    Dear Clara,
   
        I just put you down for a nap.  You had already been asleep for a little while, but you woke up early as you are wont to do, and I needed to sit in your overpriced nursery rocker and push your hair back so I could kiss your forehead until you fell back in.  You like my breath on your forehead.  You like to hold my finger in your hands.  You don't particularly like to rock, ironically, but you seem to like how the arm of that chair cradles you on one side so I can cradle you on the other.  You fell asleep fairly quickly, and so I stayed longer than I needed to.  I stared at your face and marveled at your little mouth and your little nose and your little ears.  I don't usually do this, I'm afraid.  Part of staying home with you is the home bit, and I've got things to do while you sleep.  But sometimes, I allow myself the respite of looking at you.  You've got soul-healing properties, I swear.  They tell you that you've never known love until you've had a baby.  They say that you never understand what it is to stop mattering to yourself and to know that that's actually ok.  They tell you about the chaos, the sleeplessness, the baby-proofing, the diaper pails, the overwhelming sense that you will forever be overwhelmed.  They tell you so much, but come to think of it, I don't recall hearing about the calm of holding a heart that you made.  The peace that comes with loving someone more than you love yourself.   More than that, I don't remember actually feeling the calm until recently.

   As I held you just now, kissing your tiny forehead, I cried.  You just turned one this last Saturday, and I cried for how all of this felt a year ago and the calm I didn't feel.  A year ago, I held you much the same way.  I cradled you to my chest and touched my lips to your forehead and all I felt, aside from terror that any movement I made would wake you, was like I was under water.  Not drowning, but not breathing.  Floating some, sinking a little, hoping that filling my lungs with air would bring me to the surface that I could see clearly, but somehow not quite reach.  I was supposed to know you, and I didn't.  It was all so fast and so strange, and it felt like I knew you better when you were still a physical part of me.  Before I could see your face or watch you sleep.  One six-inch incision, and nine months of learning you was slashed like a tire. I was deflated.  The sense that you were supposed to be my oxygen was there, but that hardly seemed like a fair thing to expect from someone so new.  I loved you deeply, but I did not understand you and I did not understand myself as your mother.  Wasn't something supposed to change?   Wasn't I supposed to close my eyes one moment and wake up the next and feel different?  I felt as inept as ever, counting the rises and falls of your chest, hoping that I was good enough, feeling like you were too perfect to have chosen me as your mom and that someone somewhere made a huge mistake. 

There are so many things in life that you don't realize you are learning until you look back at where you were.  A year later, the calm is here.  The magnitude of the chaos is, as well, and I still feel inept more often than not.  But a year later, I hold you and cry because I needed you to be my oxygen and you were.  You are. We save each other every day.  A year later, I understand that face.  A year later, you smile and you hug back and I know that any movement I make is just fine even if it does wake you because you like my breath on your forehead, and my finger in your hand, and the way the chair cradles your right side. 

Dear Clara,
   Thank you being so patient with me.   A year from now, I will write you again, certainly shocked by how little I knew and how far we've come, and still the luckiest person alive because I get to be your mom.