A piece I wrote a year ago when he was 9 Months Old

I'm struggling right now because my baby is not such a baby anymore and I'm torn between wanting to wean and never wanting to wean, wishing someone would watch him for a couple hours and missing him the second I'm out the door... On a particularly hard morning last week I found this piece of writing from a year ago and I can't stop thinking about how women talk about their bodies no longer being their own, and I feel that, all the time... but I also feel this fierce resistance to my baby's body becoming his very own and how that may be scaring him just as much as it scares me.

9 MONTHS OLD
How many times a day do I kiss you?
Countless.
Pressing my nose, lips, chin into your soft warm neck.
Cheeks.
Aware of how fleeting this is.
Precisely what draws me so intentionally to this indulgence of your skin,
your perfect body.
Your presence and willingness and your own awareness
​of how this will always last in our bodies
just like this.
As long as we are alive
and somewhere just as precious long after we are not.
But this smell, this sense of you is better than anything I’ve ever felt.
Intoxicating and binding our hearts.
I take it all in. 
Every hair on your head.
Every speck
Of You.

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