Count them: 2 days left of maternity leave.
Besides the monstrous presence of postpartum depression,
I'm going to miss this spaciousness, this extended time.
And if I'm being honest, I'll admit I haven't always extended my body, mind, heart or time in this space in the ways I'd hoped. So today, with the deadline approaching, there's some kind of allowance in the air.
To look, for a long long time, out the window, catching individual snowflakes on their downward journey to the splayed out, effervescent white. To eat, cookies made by Karen, cookies with high calorie content and lots of Christmas colored sugar sprinkles. Fuck you Weight Watchers; Jennifer Hudson looked better big anyway. To drink this second cup of coffee, unapologetically, because it doesn't matter if my caffeine high is too high when there's no liturgy to write or person to pastorally care for. To stay, lingering, lightly covered in magnetic desire for my spouse, in the bed for much longer than either of us anticipated when we first layed back down. To read, from a chapter of this book, then a quote from that blogger, then a yearning in my son's face which beckons a physical response that none of those literary texts can claim with any certainty. To write, not one, but two poems, in the generous moments between tasks of great and no importance (finance logging, laundry switching, bottle washing). To touch, his balding head, with two fingers, a sign of peace, pushing back what's left behind his ear with a tenderness I've never had toward any of his kind. To feel this bliss. To receive and accept this bliss. To bless this bliss. To know it's all gone soon enough. To love, even with a dash of suspicion, this life, consciously and clearly, on the horizon of yet another change, but in this moment also all-so-quiet. A quiet, a quiet that is foreign, a quite/quiet kind of foreign language, so foreign in fact that I can only pick out a single word from the entire sentence: gift.
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