A Few Months Ago

In my head, that’s when Fresco was born.

In my head, he is a few months old. I am a few months post-partum. Trombone sure is doing well adjusting to his few-months-old baby brother. Dude! The baby brother is bigger than you!

Baby brother will be 11 months old on Friday. He can walk. He can point at things. He knows where his nose is. He is sharing diapers with his older brother. He DOES NOT FIT into 6 month sized clothing. (you would think this would be my first or second clue but.)

I was rocking him to sleep just now (sleep train last week: enormous fail [my god, that was only last week?]) and thinking: this is ridiculous. I am rocking a TODDLER to sleep. He is huge. No wonder my neck hurts and my shoulder hurts and my head hurts.

When Trombone was this age I was actively weaning him to get him down to two breastfeeds a day so I could go back to work. He was always on about ducks and trying to screw the lids off bottles and eating a wide variety of foods. I was looking forward to going back to work. I wanted to ride the bus. Can you believe that?

Maybe it is because it was never my intention to go back to work after this year so I have not been thinking about April, about Fresco’s birthday, about an “end date” in so many words. And so it feels endless and like the great wall of China (or a Convoy) and I don’t see the end so how can time be progressing? And when I do think about it – work, I mean – I usually think something like, “Shit I have to fill out a form or something…I don’t know…what day is it…oh I still have a few months…”

Negative, ma’am. You do not have a few months.

It’s really a good thing I don’t have any commitments other than sweeping the floor and doing laundry. It is also a good thing we go to the library at least once a week and exchange our books far more frequently than is required. I am not at all certain I could keep track of the date if it wasn’t for my digital camera. I don’t know how the mothers of previous decades did it, kept track of things. On big wall calendars? In their diaries? Do they carve lines in the walls of their bathrooms like prisoners in their cells?

I haven’t changed my mind, though. I think about going back to work sometimes and I always feel resoundingly negative about the idea. So there is that.

I might think about this more. Right now my flu wants me to sleep the sleep of the poisoned and so I must.