Dawning

Sometimes, it is 2:44 a.m. and I am not sure if there is a more middle of the night. It is quiet except for the squeak of the chair I am sitting on and the tap of the keys. Even the hamsters who love their wheels going around and around have stopped running and crawled into their caverns to rest.

I can't sleep. It's the silence that woke me, and the silence that keeps me awake. Often I find it louder than the music that plays in our house.

I have been asking myself lately why I haven't been writing, why I haven't been blogging. And I feel sometimes like it is the pause in this space that separates me from Grace. But really that isn't so. There is no pause from Grace. I have turned inward. I have decided on private thoughts versus public ones.

Sometimes, there are actual feelings, real thoughts that I don't want to share, that I want to keep private, that I want to keep only been me and Grace. That in that privacy, I can have the kind of feelings for her that stay tucked in my soul.

Tonight as I watched Sawyer falling asleep, I thought, this is what life is. This moment, now gone, I want to forever etch into my mind. The eyes, first staring up at me, the hand holding a DS game (because he's always holding something) falls against my breast and the game slides away. His eyes blink several times and for a moment he is trying so hard to keep them open and then I whisper, "It's okay to fall asleep." And he does as if it is my permission that allows him to do that. His breathing slows and his eye lashes softly relax and he is is sleeping. And in these moments I am painfully aware at how fleeting they are. Lasting not nearly long enough. I hold my breath as the children grow, sometimes feeling impatient that it's not fast enough but most times feeling like the rush of it is all too fast, too soon.

Tonight, I wanted Grace to be watching her younger brother falling asleep, watching the two of them entwined in sleep next to me. My wants are always selfish.

And so I will go crawl back into bed to lie between father and son, to watch both of them breathe and knowing that their breath moving in and out of their bodies is something I will never, ever take for granted.