Dear Will,

The last half of my time in New York, Mondays were my day off. I would kick off the week with a trip to the corner bagel shop: flat whole-wheat sesame with bacon, egg, and gooey cheese. I’d take the bagel back to my apartment and eat it on the couch or fire escape, depending on the weather, and savor every bite. I can still remember the steam coming out of the brown paper bag when I opened my gift, can still smell the bread and taste the salty bacon. My Monday morning miracle.

Dude. What I’m saying is, you’re my bagel.

There are days when, as a parent of two small children, I find it daunting to leave my bed. Some call this a symptom of depression; for me, it’s a symptom of being alive. Life as we know it is exhausting right now. You require a lot of maintenance, still refusing to prepare your own food, wipe your own ass, wash your own clothes. Your brother was (is) the same way. And from the beginning, you’ve been my early bird, a quality I suspected from those early days fresh out of the hospital when you’d spend the last two hours before sunrise in our bed, in my arms–totally against the rules.

Oh, the rules. When your brother turned one–already having faced a more difficult road than you so far, with its physical therapists and x-rays and doctor appointments and impending (first) surgery–I wrote him a letter too. The next year, I took it all back. Because that letter was filled with all the things I would teach him, all the plans I had…in short, an agenda. We’re still recovering from that agenda, still sweeping its remnants off the floor alongside the Cheerios and nuggets, still unearthing the different and harder and somehow more beautiful plan. GB told me that the oldest child of the family pays for the parents’ mistakes the most, and don’t I know it. Once you came along, my illusions had already been injected with a hefty dose of reality. I realized, finally, that I was not in control. Not even a little. And so I let go, bit by bit, and while I rue the time it took me to do it (sing it with me: Sorry, James)–and the amount left to relinquish–I’m thankful that I’m being brought closer to the mother I was made to be, each day. I’m thankful that it means you’ll both get less of me, more of grace. (Another bit of wisdom from GB: we probably parent best when we parent less. Ha.)

So I’ve stopped reading books about discipline and I’ve started reading books about grace, about mercy, about forgiveness–one in particular. I try to watch more than I plan, so that I can really see. So that I don’t miss the beauty, the sacred, the miracles–the you.

Because you’re my Monday morning miracle. You’re the first one who makes a sound in the morning, and when I creep into your dark room, opening the door silently, you know. You giggle, and you sit up in your bed and grin at me as I turn on the light and scoop your warmth and joy into my arms. You are the final piece to the puzzle that is our family, full not of answers but of delights to be unwrapped each day: the way you gaze at your brother in rapt wonder; the babbling and cooing paired with an eyebrow raise; the laughter that fills our pre-dawn coffee and formula sessions; the no-holds-barred inquisitiveness and mischievousness of your every move. I remember the first night you slept in your own room and I switched on our new dual-camera monitor to see your big brother on one side, sprawled over his bed in his signature pose, and you on the other, tucked into your rock and play with your tiny face glowing. Two of them. I get TWO OF THEM, I thought, my heart overwhelmed with the undeserved goodness of it all, my exhaustion overruled by the gift of the pair of you, the difficulty of the days (and nights) usurped in that moment with my two boys, safe and sound down the hall and in my vision.

And GJ had told me that she knew I couldn’t imagine how I’d love this baby growing within me as much as I already loved the one growing beside me, the one with whom I had a history and a story being told, but that I would. That it would knock me over and take my breath away how much I would. And when I heard your cry in the hospital at 1 am that morning, after you had broken the water and made me puke, the tears ran down because I knew you. And I loved you. It was just that simple, just that beautiful. You had always been mine. Just like she had promised, my heart would be big enough.

Big enough, yes–but getting bigger. Painfully so. And these pains I’m having, this anxiety I’ve been feeling, it started before I can remember, before there was you or your brother or your daddy, but now it pulses and aches alongside you and at the thought of you because there is so much to love. It kicked into high gear the weekend I stopped nursing you, when I took your brother to the hospital for yet another scan, then thought it would be a good idea to try an intensive potty-training program a few days later. The turning of the page, six months into your life, the changing chapter and hormones and all of it, left me a bit more bereft than I expected, the highs and lows swinging about wildly. You’re the caboose, which means these milestones are each the last, and that makes them more beautiful–but also creates a trail of grief it would be unwise to either deny or remain in. I’m navigating that now, this postpartum, post-childbearing chapter of my life, in which I watch you grow as I debate whether to color the gray hairs now or wait. This is why the word bittersweet was coined.

But there is redemption. There is joy in the passage of time, there is learning from mistakes and receiving forgiveness for them, there is the second-time-around grace. There is the fact that I didn’t love being pregnant and I didn’t love not sleeping but that you’re here anyway, and therefore so loved before you even began, in that year of waiting and losing and praying, in that thirty-seven years without you until now, in this last year when you have completed our circle. And there is your name, Protector, which–like your brother’s, we never knew the perfect fit of until you came along and owned it. Your big brother, who alternately pats your head and tolerates you, will have you alongside him, and this will help make you the person you’re meant to be.

I think you’re up to it. After all, you were made for it.

To my once and always baby, I love you more than words can say.

Love,
The Ass Wiper