Everyone told me that having a baby would truly show me what it meant to love. That nothing would compare and that the love I would feel for that tiny bundle would be like nothing I had ever felt before. When I was pregnant with Asher I knew I loved him, I could feel him inside me and as he grew so did my love for the tiny stranger within me. Once he was born I stared into his eyes and I loved him even more, but I didn’t exactly think that what I was feeling was something new or unfamiliar. I loved him, but I felt it was the same depth of love that I felt for my husband, parents, family and dearest friends. I felt I had been deceived in some way, or that the reality of the feelings that I would have for my son was blown out of proportion. Like it was a story that parents told other parents because it sounded romantic.
Slowly and almost imperceptibly at first that love grew. The more I got to know my little boy, the more my heart swelled with love for him. One day as I looked at his tiny face I was suddenly struck by the enormity of the feelings that I felt for him. I could hardly comprehend the power of my love for this perfect soul. To love someone so completely is something I have never experienced. I ache every time I see my nose and his father’s lips together on his face. Sometimes I literally can not get close enough to him. I want to inhale him and soak him up. I want to bottle the way his skin feels under my finger tips and the way he smells in the grey early morning light, so that years from now, when he is grown, I can be brought back and remember them as vividly as I am experiencing them now.
He is growing so fast, I feel like this precious time with him is slipping away. This time when I am the center of his world. I have never wanted to be the center of anyone’s world, but now that I am, I savor the weight of it. In just one month he will start on solid food and I suspect that will be the first step towards him gaining his independence. I want that for him. I want him to grow up and to leave the nest and to get married and to have babies of his own, but it still aches. The thought of him leaving. He will only be a baby for a year. One, single short year and then he’ll be a toddler, a little boy, a teenager, a man and I won’t be able to sneak into his room at night just to gaze at him and savor the sweet sounds of his breath. That year is nearly half gone already and I can’t seem to comprehend how that even happened. Every day the depth of my feelings for him grows stronger. I already struggle to understand the vastness of how I feel for him and I know that there is no way to even fathom what my love will be for him in 2 days, 2 weeks, 2 years, 2 decades. I feel so incredibly humbled that I get to know this bright soul before anyone else does. I don’t always cherish the moments I have with him. When I’m up with him at 4 a.m. or when he spits up down my shirt I think about how I can’t wait for him to outgrow this stage, too just be a little bit older. But when he’s nursing and gazing at me with those slate grey eyes, I know that I want to hold on to these fleeting second for eternity. I can’t though. I blink and they’re gone, soon to become distant fading memories, clouded by the onslaught of time. My yucky, sticky, sweet, happy little boy.
