Babies Don't Keep

This is my precious baby boy right now. Shhh! He’s sleeping. Actually you can make as much noise as you’d like. He sleeps just like his father… like a rock. Hence, I was able to snap this photo mere moments ago without making him stir.

I have to go peek in on him every few minutes. Not because I am checking to see if he’s breathing. But, rather to check and make sure he is still small. It seems every time I blink he gets bigger, and I don’t want to miss a thing. Queue Areosmith.

I’ve been thinking about him growing up a lot lately. The other day we took our first shopping trip with him FORWARD facing in the Baby Bjorn. He had a great time. As I walked through the grocery store he was a flurry of madly kicking legs and happily dancing arms. With Normy’s face to the world several people were drawn in by his tractor beam of cuteness and stopped to chat the two of us up. Everyone had the same story…

“Ahhh! He’s so cute!” (I know.) “It seems like yesterday mine kids were that tiny and now they are grown and gone. Enjoy every second. It sure goes fast!”

NOOOO!

The thought sends shivers down my spine. I know I have written about this before, but I think about it often. I do not EVER want Normy to grow up and move away. And then I start thinking about my own parents. We are separated by the ENTIRE country; I live as far west of them as I possibly could and still be in the continental USA. And that’s just what happens. Kids grow up, the go off to college, they get jobs, the wind blows, and we all scatter like seeds. I have aunts and uncles in California, Wyoming, Virginia, New York, Pennsylvania, Florida, and North Carolina and they all started off in the same one stop light town.

It certainly puts into perspective the way I moved out. I was 19. My mom and I had gone to see a movie that afternoon. When we got back I received a phone call from my long-term boyfriend who was in the Navy and stationed in Pensacola. Okay, he wasn’t my boyfriend; he was my husband. We had eloped about a month earlier. I was a parent’s worst nightmare. Anyway, he said he finally had enough money for me to come live with him. He said, “Leave tomorrow.” I did. I packed up my car kissed my mother good bye and left. My Dad was camping with my brother and my sister was also out of town. I didn’t even wait around to say good bye to them. I just left.

It makes me sick to my stomach to think about it now. I look back and want to take the 19 year old me by the hair and drag her back home. I wish I could have shaken some sense into myself. It is eight years later and of course my family and I have recovered from my reckless youth. But Lord, please help me if Normy is as stubborn and delinquent as I was. My heart will burst in a million pieces if he moves out in the same fashion I did. Now I know my mom’s heart did, and I would do anything to take it back.

But one way or another the day will come that my son will be a man. I will dance with him at his wedding and will have to share him Christmases with his in-laws. He too may move across the country from Smoochy and I. And just like my parents do, I will deal with it. But, I also might bitch about it a lot on our weekly telephone chat. Do you think he might be a big enough mama’s boy to call me every day?

One of Normy’s and my favorite books to read together is a Nursery Rhymes book with lovely textured pages. It was a baby shower gift, but shamefully I cannot remember which kind soul gave it to him. (If it was YOU please speak up and take the well deserved credit!) On the front cover of this book, the gift giver pasted a poem written by an unknown poet. This poem perfectly expresses how I TRY to live my days. Every time I read this book to Norm I also read this poem, and 2 out of 3 times it makes me cry.

Babies Don’t Keep!
Cleaning and cooking can wait ‘til tomorrow
For babies grow up, as we have learned to our sorrow.
So quiet down the cobwebs, dust go to sleep!
I’m rocking my baby, and babies don’t keep!

There, I’ve gone and done it again. I am crying.