My little one turns two today. Little one as opposed to big one, the one who’s five and a half, don’t forget the half, and So Intense about everything that I feel exhausted by the notion of another battle, before it even begins. The one who took 36 hours to arrive, 5 of it pushing. The one who never took a nap voluntarily, not once, and if she happened to lose the fight with fatigue and succumb to sleep, would wake crying, furious. “Dammit!” you could tell she was thinking, “I can’t believe I fell asleep!! I’m SO PISSED!!! And it’s ALL YOUR FAULT!!” Every time.
Little Bit is the sunshine girl, the giggly one, the one who says “hug mommy?” if she sees I’m sad; my secret delight, my joy. And now she’s two. Which may, I know, mean an end to the unadulterated delight and joy. But she still naps, for hours at a time; wakes happy, arms up: “Alldone, mommy.” Watching her, I finally understand why people have told me, my whole life, I have a very expressive face. Since she was tiny, she’s made the funniest faces – expressions her big sister has never had. When people announce, “Oh! She looks just like you!!” – I always demur, “Oh, really?? Do you think so??” – but I love to hear it, pricking my heart with the thought that maybe I too was once That Adorable.
Inhaling her sleepy smell this morning, I’m astonished that two years have gone by. Two years since my water broke on the couch and I announced that it was time to go, now and I mean NOW. Two years since I was crawling up the inside of the window suggesting to the most prudent man in the world that if he didn’t want me to have this baby Right In His Car he’d better blow that red light, and the one after it too.
He didn’t, though he did kind of coast through it before it turned fully green. And I didn’t, not quite. We’re about 6 minutes, legally, from the hospital, and she was born about 17 minutes after we left the house. They’d temporarily closed the only elevators I knew about (are hospitals actually required to be under endless construction?) and I remember somehow finding the wherewithal to ask a nurse in the hall how I could get to the 6th Floor, Delivery, please? And thinking I’d never, ever, make it, walking down the hallway there on 6, being witlessly scared because nothing that was happening was within my control. And, amusingly, hearing someone who clearly knew what they were seeing say, “She’s holdin’ her butt, get her in a room!!” And hissing at the poor hapless floor doc (who was trying, in the absence of my OB or anyone else qualified for the task, to examine me) that he needed to get his hands off me and never, ever, put them back there again. And I remember shaking for a long, long time after she came, that little 8-pound-almost-an-ounce rush of amazement.
Two years. A lifetime. Happy birthday, baby.
