You’ve likely seen it already, but Carissa posted this yesterday: “I was looking for a document and ran across an old text. It was the book I was making for Margot, similar to the book I made for Penn. I can’t remember if I ever posted it. I hadn’t finished the pages yet. It is such an accurate description of us.”
I spend my days holding her close with ideas that maybe I could put her back in. Keep her safe. Maybe if I rock her long enough I can encourage some sort of osmosis. Absorb her. And of course I am. Just not literally. I imagine a bubble around her. Dreams and love and ideas are spun like sugar around us.
I spend my days kissing each roll beneath her chin, the back of her neck, the top of her head where the swirls of black hair spin out around and around and into a peak at the top. I run my lips across the corner of her mouth, across the hill of her cheek and down the bottom of her earlobe. I blow into her soft wrinkled bellybutton and kiss the backs of her fleshy thighs. Her hands and feet find their way into my mouth like magic. She is the softest thing that has ever existed.
She burrows into my breast to nurse and heaves a sigh of contentment when we’re all settled in to one another. Her eyes close and her lashes are made from the delicate feathers of baby birds. I am swollen with longing. I pray to Father Time to keep us this way forever. Or at least a little while longer.
When she cries in the arms of someone else I am pulled like a magnet. I am biologically wired to retrieve and protect but I don’t. I wait. Smile. Gently take her when she’s handed over and I coo and assure that it’s okay out there in the world. That I’ll always be here to come back to. Always. Always.
When she cries in her Daddy’s cradle I wait longer. I whisper to her that her Daddy has never loved anyone more in the whole wide world and there are no arms better or safer for her to cry in.
Her Daddy stands tall and roars at the world with brawn and willpower promising excruciating elements to any who might harm his precious baby. Just as easily he turns and nuzzles her with such gentleness, golden whiskers and bright blue eyes. “Hi, Beautiful.”
I spend my days holding her close and teaching her independence. Hoping I come upon some magical formula that can balance the two through the tornadoes of growing up. Hoping that someday she will be a woman, my daughter and my friend and we can sit back in our dreams and love and ideas, spun like sugar around us.