flowing

This morning I was doing the very over-due job of cleaning Katie's bedroom. Several weeks ago we put her into her own room and put the older two kids together and while it is working well, I just barely got to tidying it up from the switch and taking all of Jack's stuff out. 

While I was working away, I came across this old photo and it stopped me in my tracks:

Ana was 2 weeks old. Why this picture was in Katie's room is beyond me, but I sat and looked at it for a while. I tried to reconnect with my 22-year-old self, but I couldn't find the connection. Somehow I don't remember what it was like to be a brand new mother.  Was I stressed out a lot? Was I clueless? Did it come naturally? What were my days like?  Time has wiped my memory of that time with just me and one little baby.

A few minutes later I walked down the hall to show the picture to Dave. I saw Jack sitting on his bedroom floor, looking at books. When I got to my room, Katie was sitting next to Dave jabbering about all the pictures in her book. I sat down next to them and talked to her for a while.

All morning my heart has been full of love for these little children. Katie is so big. She talks well and understands everything. Today I walked into the kitchen and she was standing on the step-stool using a beater as a microphone. Jack is such a great kid. He loves to read his Bob books and he is really doing well. When I dropped him off at preschool, I looked out over the Elementary School playground and there was Ana, waving at me with a big grin. She waved until I pulled out of the parking lot and then turned around and ran off. I thought of Jack at 3 and how I used to always tell him that I wanted him to stay 3 forever and how he is going to Kindergarten next year and how lucky he will be to have Ana there to hug him in the hallway and get on the bus with him each morning.

One of my favorite poems keeps running through my mind. I know I have shared it before:

Blood and Milk 

I dreamed of Oxford . . . (spires, a thousand spires, endless lectures, musty halls
a solitary self in a Bodleian expanse
A good life my dear Wormwood. An orderly life.)

then awakened to laundry
and things to be wiped
(countertops, noses, bottoms)

How did this happen? And when, exactly?
Time flows, it flows, it flows
and there are choices to be made:

left or right?
paper or plastic?
blood or milk?

There's freedom in the bleeding;
bondage in the milk—do not be deceived.
Ah, but it's an empty freedom; a holy bondage,
A sweet and holy bondage.
Five times I chose the chains, those tender chains,
(though once will bind you just as well!)
and checked the crimson flow.
Suckled while dreaming of Trinity Term
but awakened, always awakened, to the laundry
and to that small and cherished captor at my breast.

by Sharlee Mullins Glenn

Time flows along so silently I hardly realize it is happening. The things that worry me today will be behind me before I know it. Someday I will have a dishwasher and will forget the time when I almost cried at the thought of doing the dishes. Someday the couch won't be a constant laundry pile.  And though I stress about the house and the laundry and a million other things, they will probably be forgotten.  The times I sit on the bed talking to Katie, or play a game with Jack, or snuggle Ana on the couch will be cherished. It is a beautiful work I am doing.