Two things can be true

How can I wish a moment away whilst also wishing it would never end?

My toddler fell asleep on my chest this evening.

There was a time when I didn’t think I’d ever find that remarkable, but the rarer this gets, the more I want to hold onto it. Moments that used to drown me are now pouring through the cracks between my fingers.

That doesn't mean I don't also love this version of motherhood. Two things can be true.

Sometimes, when my daughter falls asleep on me or asks to get in the sling, I think: "Will this be the last time?" I know one day it really will be, but by then, we’ll have moved on to something else.

There are things about the first few weeks and months that felt frustrating in the moment but that I now look back on with fondness, longing for that version of her. Do I really miss it, I wonder, or is this glow of hindsight a coping mechanism, an ancient reflex that tricks us into doing it all over again?

There are things I don’t miss at all about those early days, of course. Sleeping in 20-minute chunks. Unfathomable, inconsolable crying. The tss-chug-tss-chug-tss-chug of that fucking breast pump.

When it felt like I couldn't get anything done because I spent all day holding my sleeping baby. Now, I feel pulled to write about this unexpected babe-in-arms, to press the memory between the pages of my notebook. Her curls right at kissing height, the vulnerable softness of her cheek, her heart beating right next to mine like it did when she grew in my belly.

Her first day and two nights ago

Now, there are new moments to find annoying, frustrating, overwhelming. Yesterday, she threw a box of friendship beads across the kitchen. We looked at one another in defiant silence until they stopped clicking across the lino, and I fetched a sweeping brush. “Up mummy, UP mummy, UP MUMMY,” she insisted. I lifted her with one arm, carried on swishing the beads into one corner of the kitchen with the other.

Maybe one day I’ll look back and wish I could still pick her up, still sweep with her on one hip, still feel her hands tugging at the hem of my skirt. See, I’m already giving myself pre-emptive nostalgia for the very moments I just said were frustrating.

I hope I can look back on all the versions of my motherhood and be glad I took deep breaths and slowed my pace and gave my daughter as much of me as she needed in the moment — even when part of me felt pulled elsewhere. And I also hope that I can have compassion for the immense frustration I felt. Two things can be true.

I’ll miss this stage, too. And then I’ll continue throwing myself so deeply into the next stage that that one also feels like drowning, and I’ll look back on this as the calm before the storm. Each storm almost passes by before I remember to turn my face to the sky and drink it all in.

Each version of motherhood is a new calm and a new storm. Two things can be true.