"Why Aren't You My Mommy?"
I just came from Nora's room. After half an hour of sobbing, rocking, singing, and fanning (thank God for fans on hot August nights!), she is at last asleep.
Nora is in the clingy stage, the "Why aren't you my mommy and what have you done with her?" stage. Every so often she would leave off crying long enough to look at me, and perceiving that I was not her mother, began to scream again.
Ah, well.
Soon enough I will be teaching her to ride her first pony, and to make apple pie and sew cross-stitch samplers. Soon enough we will be playing dress-up and having piratical adventures on the high seas. All too soon she will be grown, this darling of my heart, and her wide green eyes will be full of intelligent, educated, godly (we devoutly hope!) purpose.... whereas now they are full of tears and rage.
Still, even at this age and this stage of ira in absentia parentorum (as I have decided to call it), there are sweet moments. I DON'T mean the moments when I am trying to give her her bottle between screams---those are the moments where you want to have your phone on 911 standby for a choking baby. No, the ones I mean are those few precious moments after she's too tired to mind that you aren't her mommy, but before she is quite asleep.
You know what I mean: the minutes when it is enough that you are a singing, rocking, back-rubbing person who says "I love you" over and over again. At last, after two hours of patient effort, there came a few seconds when she looked at me and didn't burst into tears. And then there can a time when I stopped singing and rubbing her back, and she looked up to make sure I was still there.
An aunt can live a long time on the memory of such seconds.
Nora is in the clingy stage, the "Why aren't you my mommy and what have you done with her?" stage. Every so often she would leave off crying long enough to look at me, and perceiving that I was not her mother, began to scream again.
Ah, well.
Soon enough I will be teaching her to ride her first pony, and to make apple pie and sew cross-stitch samplers. Soon enough we will be playing dress-up and having piratical adventures on the high seas. All too soon she will be grown, this darling of my heart, and her wide green eyes will be full of intelligent, educated, godly (we devoutly hope!) purpose.... whereas now they are full of tears and rage.
Still, even at this age and this stage of ira in absentia parentorum (as I have decided to call it), there are sweet moments. I DON'T mean the moments when I am trying to give her her bottle between screams---those are the moments where you want to have your phone on 911 standby for a choking baby. No, the ones I mean are those few precious moments after she's too tired to mind that you aren't her mommy, but before she is quite asleep.
You know what I mean: the minutes when it is enough that you are a singing, rocking, back-rubbing person who says "I love you" over and over again. At last, after two hours of patient effort, there came a few seconds when she looked at me and didn't burst into tears. And then there can a time when I stopped singing and rubbing her back, and she looked up to make sure I was still there.
An aunt can live a long time on the memory of such seconds.
posted by Praelucor at 8:04 PM
1 Comments:
Oh. How beautiful.
I would look up to make sure you were still there.
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