Night watch

Long night watches. 

I toss and turn under a sea of blankets. I am rocking. In my head in my body. The pulse of milk flowing through my breasts into a hungry mouth. Her salty tears on my fingertips, a storm of tiny hands and feet flailing in a dark bedroom. The full moon is reaching through the window and holding us in her arms. We are concentric circles cradling the smaller and smallest. 

I don’t know what to do. She is crying and I am near crying and nothing seems to work to calm the little seal eyes to sleep. That’s not true. It feels true in the middle of the night but the real truth is that she does sleep. For minutes or hours and then wakes with a yelp and a gulp of air into steady lungs and she wants me. She wants me there. 

How can I say no to this little one? Why do I want things to be different, for her actions to change and voice to quiet down into nothing more than the slow rhythmic breathing of one asleep? I am a mother. Accept it. Surrender to the fact that there is no schedule other than the ever-shifting one that she holds. We are in this together. There is not a malicious intent in her nightly wakings. She is hungry, she is tired, she has sharp teeth erupting through smooth gums. She wants to be comforted and held. She wants the pain to stop. There is nothing wrong with this. She does not need to be broken of a habit or chastised into remission. Neither do I.

The ironic part is that I miss her when she sleeps. A friend told me this years ago when I was visiting her family for a night. Her toddler finally quieted and went to bed and there was no way for me to understand what she was saying because for me it was a relief to be alone in an adult space with my friends and thought that it must be a relief for them, too. 

Now I understand. 

As a mama, I miss the little sounds and laughs and attempts at words. I miss the slapping of the floor by little hands and muffled farts through a cloth diaper and big hearty screams of delight. I am always listening. Even when she is finally sleeping I sneak into the room and place a hand on her soft belly or stand motionless on the creaky floor boards of our room and listen for the fluttering breaths of my tiny creation. 

I think of the days when she resided in the dark curve of my belly and I hiked silently through the woods or rolled over in bed without a concern, without listening with my whole body for her little sounds. And I prefer this constant (sometimes noisy) contradiction: I want her to sleep, I want her to be awake.

I am more tired and more alive than I have ever been in my life.