things remembered, things seen.

i'll remember this season as one that moved quick like a rabbit. a stretch of time moving through me, rather than with me, when i woke each day and my belly felt bigger than just hours before, and calendar pages fluttered faster than hummingbird wings.

i'll remember how tenderly my christopher loved baby, loved me, and how this somehow deepened my love for him. i loved him before, so entirely, but i study him now, falling in love with his fatherhood, with our child, and my adoration adds and adds. i see him as the man who gives me everything, everything. life, love, happiness, our babies, a safe, a wild, a home.

i'll remember, too, how i felt like a mother from the very beginning, right from the dawn of that bright morning in may when we first knew. it doesn't take a babe in arms to make a mama's heart. i'll remember how i wondered what sort of mother i'll be, and how i made lists of the sort of mother i want to be.

and thus i'll remember the tribe that circled me, and showed me how. sisters of all walks, most themselves in the thick of raising little ones, spending precious breaths on me, carving time to send encouragement, a countdown, a cozy (for while you wait for baby) — to share words of affirmation, of advice — to speak frankly about birth, and after — to nudge me towards self-care and the courage to ask for help when i need it, not if. i cannot know now, from where i stand on this side of the bridge, what i will need, but i know they'll be searching me for the answer in days ahead, for they have walked here, too.

i think when you maybe weren't given something you needed in your most tender years, you cobble it together yourself. that's what my womenfolk are to me — a quilt of patchwork squares, handstitched seams where their lives meet mine — a gathering of kindred spirits into a brilliant bouquet — a hymn of endless understanding (of days, of nights, that mothers need mothering) — a branchful of songbirds trilling all the things i hope to be: kind. patient. predictable. a soft place to land. dripping in grace. the feeling of home.