1+1=4

Dear Jacob and Sabine,

Today one of you turns five months old, the other is five years old, and it has been exactly nineteen years since my father died. I've lived over two thirds of my life without him. Something I think about is the fact that I only have a handful of good, solid memories of my dad, but I can hardly remember a time when I wasn't your mother. I'm terrified something will happen to me; that even though I've poured my heart into loving the both of you, and your world spins under the umbrella of my existence in the here and now, one day I could become a fraction of memory to you. These precious days, months and years could fade into a fleeting wisp of your past.

For now our lives are full of each other, full of more happiness and love than I've ever had before or can expect to have again. So full, in fact, that I haven't had time to record our days with the urgency I'd like to. Oh I started posts for each of you, and the time to finish them came and went. And then some more time went by. And as I started to think about picking back up where I left off, I was so sad for the details that'd gone by unwritten about. It sort of reminds me of that poem, Footprints in the Sand...the man is walking on the beach and at his most troubled times it appears God is not with him, etc, you know the story. On paper it might appear that our lives were empty during these recent weeks, but the truth is that life was so full, no time was left for putting it into words.

Then I have the problem of which details to put into which child's blog. Your little lives, Jacob and Sabine, have become so intertwined that it's impossible to say who gets to claim ownership over which memories. It's like the way I try to take a photograph of just one of you, but the other of you somehow always creeps into the photo. Each of you alone no longer makes sense. You are two halves of my heart. Yes, that's what it's like to be your mother. You're each like a chunk of my heart, and you're walking around outside my body and it is scary. I am constantly feeling the pull of my heart in two different directions. I don't expect that will ever change. The mothers who've experienced this phenomenom will tell you so. They also tell you that having a second child doesn't double your work, it quadruples it. And I am finding this to be true, that 1+1=4.

What's inevitable is that someday your world will outgrow my world. No matter how hard I say my silent wish, "Stay small, stay small, stay small." But for now, you are my babies, and the best I can hope for is that you will always know in your hearts where you came from.