Four.

 
There's a song on the radio sometimes, the artist is Sia.  And she sings of stamina, and one day he asked me to clarify.

I told him stamina is what people have who never give up.

"So Mommy," he says. 

"It's a song about you."



Today I got up and dressed.  I made the coffee and I looked in my rear view as I left the driveway.  I went to work and I answered emails and questions and blank stares.  But today is different from the others.  Today, there should be a four year old; a bouncing, curious, little girl with her daddy wrapped around her finger, giving chase to her brothers in the yard. 

Today I should know what it's like to braid thin, toddler hair, to readjust the straps of tiny Mary Janes Christmas morning. 

I should know all her favorites, every scrape and scar. There should be things to look back on, a lifetimes' gallery in my head.  Her smile, her laugh, her touch, these things should feel like home. 

I should be closer to some, and a stranger to many more.  So many who have saved me,  so many who have let me down.

I shouldn't know all the things that I do; shouldn't have a clue of the weight of one's dead baby in her arms, what such a weight does to one. 

Today I've been trying to remember our last together. Is it a purposeful thing, the forgetting?  The little details that are all there, somewhere, that my mind won't always let me see? 

There was a story, a children's book, read aloud to a three year old.  We'd moved his things into his new room, fresh paint on the walls.   There was breakfast and lunch and nap time, and Olympic figure skating on the television.  I can't watch it anymore.

I remember it was cold but it was light out, then abruptly so very dark.  I remember the sun disappearing through the blinds; sensing a chill with the fade.  

And I remember when the nurse began to cry behind her glasses.  She was still searching but the tears came anyway. 

I don't remember the book.  Or what was on my plate.  I don't remember much of what was said, or  when it was that I think I knew.  And I don't remember how it felt just then, or feeling much of anything at all.  For a time.


If I could go back, I'd laminate the pages.  Frame their faces in my mind and revisit on the weekends.  I would memorize the sounds and hoard it all somewhere safe, somewhere the joy couldn't mask what had been, because what had been is all I've got. 

And I think this is what most cannot understand, don't have to.  They can see how the pain dislocates, how it stiffens in places and pulls in others and how it, quite clearly and quite cruelly sometimes, envelops and darkens the person they once knew. 

But they don't see how it builds upon the insides, like skyscrapers from stone. 

They don't know of the love that I know.  The one that spans all space and flesh and time.  The one that grew within me, grows within me, still. 

And while they assume I'd run from the fire, if I could, they are wrong. I am in search of it always.  Forever in its wake.

And while this doesn't make me lucky or envied or wise, it makes me strong.  It makes me her mother.