Right now, at this very moment, I’m losing my beautiful baby boy.
He’s fading away—both slowly and suddenly.
Each day, when I walk into his room to greet his giggles and grin, he seems a little taller. A little leaner. And his hair—oh, that hair—once fine and silky like blades of buffalo grass, has now flourished into a dense and dark canopy of luxurious locks. (Seriously, this kid has better hair than me.)
My little baby, whose fragile body once perfectly fit in my arms, now sprawls himself across my entire torso, limbs spilling over as they dangle downward.
And yet, he’s still a baby. Sort of.
He’s in that transient flicker of time nestled between the rolling romps of babydom and the wobbly sprints of toddlerhood. He is, for a lack of a better word, a boddler.
Just a few short weeks ago, he couldn’t even get up on all fours to crawl. And now? He crawls, cruises, stands, and walks (with a walker). It’s like I blinked and his babyness went bye-bye.
His appendages, previously pudgy and adorably anamorphic, are now gradually sculpting their way into muscles. A calf here. A bicep there.
And it’s not just his body that’s grown leaps and bounds. His mind is expanding at an astronomical rate, grasping to make sense of this mad and crazy world. (Good luck, kiddo.) Sometimes, I can almost see his little neurons connecting the dots.
Naturally, as motherly instinct, I sometimes find myself clinging to any last bits of ‘baby’ I can—those chubby, chipmunk cheeks; our bedtime snuggles.
But as any mother—any parent—knows, one day I’ll wake up and he will be gone. He will no longer be a baby.
However, I’ve come to realize that while he may no longer be a baby, he will always and forever be, and indisputably be, my baby.
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