Isabel will be two years old two weeks from tomorrow. As I held her snuggled against me and nursing in the early dawn hours today, I realized that our days of cuddling like that are numbered. She is moving out of babyhood ever so surely. Before I know it she will have legs as long as mine and I will not be able to really remember what it was like to hold her so close, when she fit in my arms, when her length was such that her legs reached only to my belly. I try to hold these memories against me as she nurses. When she is tired she will let her eyes drift, half closed, then she will look up at me, tracking my gaze for a few moments, before letting her eyes drift again. When she has decided that she is going to sleep, she raises her arm in front of her face to block out the light. Gradually her sucking recedes. I can tell when she is not moving so quickly into slumber or when she doesn’t want to sleep but keep on sucking when the sucking fades and I try to move away, then the mouth comes after me like a little leech: Get back here! I’m not done! Open and ready to grab my nipple and hold tight again. Oh, I love nursing and holding my baby. I don’t want to lose these memories. We have them little for such a short time. While it’s happening it is so easy to complain about the time we don’t have to sew or write or whatever, but then the time is gone and we wonder how it passed so fast. I recognize this dilemma. I know that over the next year, she will become taller and stronger. Her burgeoning vocabulary will become full sentences and words everyone else can understand. She will still nurse, but she won’t be a baby really anymore. They enter two a baby; they leave it a child. I welcome who she will be, but I do not want to forget the baby she was.
Isabel on a bench in Barcelona, August 2011
