Stuck

Today I put Charlie down for his morning nap as soon as we got home from dropping Finny off, and then I hit the ground running. Laundry down the chute. Sheets off Finny’s bed. Dust. Change out laundry. Heat up coffee. Attack list: write ad, renew library books, plan Christmas budget, plan playdate, call Cincinnati Bell about slow Internet, order hats and mittens online, blog.

As I was busily buzzing around the house, moving as fast as my legs would carry me and constantly being stopped by new reminder bells in my head to add to the list—fix squeaky door, put away Halloween costumes, clean toilets, pay speeding ticket, empty dishwasher—I heard Charlie up in his room still crying. It had been twenty, maybe thirty minutes. I knew he was tired, so why still crying?

I set my hot coffee on the coaster and paused my work at the computer and climbed the stairs to see if I could give him a quick back rub and get him to settle into his snooze, but when I opened the door, I found that the poor baby was stuck. His chubby thigh was pinned between the rails of his crib. I’ve never used a bumper pad because the American Academy of Pediatrics has always scared me away from them, but this situation would make a good argument for them. So I jimmied his pudgy little thigh out of the crib rails and I picked him up to soothe him out of his hysterics. Then, I made him a bottle and settled into the rocking chair in his room and I rocked him and fed him as we listened to some lullabies and the soft whir of his fan. Then, he fell asleep, and I was stuck.

Charlie never sleeps in my arms, he’s never slept on my chest or in my bed, and we almost never rock him to sleep. There’s just been no time and no energy to give Charlie this kind of pampering. He gets lots of compliments on his good-natured demeanor, so maybe this is a direct result of the fact that this kid has just had to roll with it a bit more than his brother had to. ( I actually spent $7 on Grapeseed Oil once to give Finny a baby massage as recommended by a video I watched. I used it once.)

As Charlie snoozed in my arms, the list ticked on in my head, but I found that I couldn’t get up. I was stuck in the chair, pinned down by a kind of life-affirming pleasure that only comes around if you allow yourself to be still long enough to capture it. Like watching the sun fall through the leaves onto a wooded path, it was, in every sense— bliss.

And even though the list ticked on—change the carseats, organize the clothes, order printer paper—I found that there was a louder voice overtaking it. The voice of an older, wiser me from ten years down the road, saying, “Ten years from now, you will give anything to hold this sleeping baby in your arms and rock back and forth. Ten years from now, you will long for the smell of him and the feeling of his soft palm wrapped around your hand. Ten years from now, you will close your eyes and try hard to remember that soft line of reddish curls across the top of his head and those big, red lips pressed together between those soft, chubby cheeks. Ten years from now, you will wish you’d stayed in that chair forever, that you had never gotten up to check your email.”

And so I stayed, and I rocked the baby that I never get to rock, and it occurred to me that this is the reason I breathe in and out. To hold Charlie, just like this, across my lap, in the crook of my arm, while the ten a.m. sun blinks through the shades onto our little chair. It occurred to me that getting stuck is often inconvenient—in a traffic jam, in a snowstorm, behind the lady who STILL writes checks at the grocery store—but that getting stuck is sometimes life’s way of getting us to stop endlessly looking ahead and to notice with big, bright, clear eyes the blessing of the moment we’re in. The pure, decadent joy of holding my ten-month-old baby as we rock…back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.