I’m stumbling around in this stupor of sleep-deprived gratefulness, marvelling at the gift on my breast, all the while feeling every ounce of strength leaving my body. One minute I’m lonely. The next I’m pushing everyone away. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, but perhaps I’m too tired for either. It’s all so real and omnipresent, and if I think about it too much, it will overwhelm me.
And I can’t escape the reality that it all depends on me. Her energy to keep breathing, her warmth and comfort, her knowledge that there is good in the world. And I want so desperately for someone to take care of me, but I must keep going and I must keep giving. How am I going to make it through the day? Through the night?
There is no such thing as a day, only a shifting semblance of time as I live by the demands of food and sleep, one cycle at a time. But who cares for the clock? Certainly not she, and I will do better to set my eyes on a kinder rhythm, the kind that paces me to a truer sense of life. Lub-dub. Lub-dub.
For I am holding eternity next to my heart. And it is warm and breathing and beautiful to behold.
And though I could fall off the bed for tiredness, and she has at last succumbed to sleep, I want to hold her for a few minutes more, because God has drawn near in the crook of my arm. All that was and will be is here in this moment, and if I can just be held in it, everything is going to be ok.
We are going to make it together. One breath at a time.
~lg
