Robert Munsch (seriously, it took me THREE tries to type his last name right!) penned
the book. The book that makes most moms weep (and others cringe). It's about a mom that sneaks into her son's room at various stages of his life- even after he moves out and has a child of his own (the cringe-worthy part)- and takes him onto her lap to rock and sing to him.
I read it before I had a child, and it was mushy and moving, and of course, now that I have a kid, it makes me bawl my face off when he ends up rocking his mom at the end. I actually don't own it. Weird right? But I think it's too heavy a read for a three year old, and I don't want to bawl my face off every time she requests it.
The book is in my head lately because I seem to be going through a grieving process of late. It's not all consuming or anything requiring medicaton - but lately, I've started staying in bed with Shae after she goes to sleep. I study her face the way I did when she was a newborn, and completely foreign to me.
Her face floats back and forth between the sleeping 1 week old and the sleeping 3 year old. Her lips are transposed over the memory of her brand new wrinkly lips and her flushed sleeping cheeks are a gateway to remembering how small her little face was - when I could kiss a quarter of her face at a time.
And I CRY! I cry and cry and cry and cry, big woeisme sobs with runny nose, while I look over her long form and smell her stinky sleepy breath and kiss her little face as much as I like because she can't protest - because when did this happen? When did she stop being a baby?
How am I ever going to live when she is too big to want me to throw out my arm to snuggle under? How will I ever remember how lovely it was to sneak into her bed and stroke her impossibly soft face and kiss that soft place under her chin I made? HOW FAST will it seem that she is ready to live out in the world after it's happened?
And it's too much and too terrible to comprehend - and it's MY JOB. I have to MAKE her ready to do that. To make her way. And so I cry - because it's the VERY LAST THING I want to imagine doing - and the single most important thing I'll do. An absolute catch .22.
How did Robert Munsch see into my future? Did his mom do this too? I'll bet. I'll bet moms everywhere do this awful terrible task, and only mourn the passing from year to
every better year in the dark of a bedroom, over their sleeping baby's form...
