When Baby Turns 2

Today was an epic day in the Braun household. An exhilarating, terrifying, heart-wrenching, glorious day. A day I’ve been longing for and dreading ever since I joined the ranks of motherhood almost 12 years ago. Today baby turned two. Not just the baby. The. Baby.

When baby turns two, you say goodbye to diapers, bottles, and midnight wakings. You can expand your Sunday wardrobe to include clothing that doesn’t have secret milk machine trapdoors. You can wear dangly earrings without fear of being dislobed. You can even consider the possibility of the future purchase of white pants. You are well on your way to being free.

But when baby turns two, you say goodbye to their soooooft skin, their miraculous eversweet breath, and all those firsts that seem like distant memories of a lifetime ago. Your days of trying to decipher unintelligible babble are rapidly dwindling; your opportunities to find custom artwork in bafflingly custom places is becoming rarer; you are closer to bidding farewell on the first day of preschool than you are to welcoming baby into this world. Yes, you are well on your way to being free.

But sometime in the last two years, something unsettling, nay diabolical, has happened. That pesky biological clock, the one that alarmed you repeatedly for so many years that it was that magic time again (and again. And again. And again.), has morphed. It has mutated into some kind of cuckoo, reverse biological clock (maybe even a diabological clock?). Because now, instead of hearing the available moments of your fertility and youth ticking away at a sing-songy pace, you hear the ominous dong moment by moment of the disappearance of the youth of your children. And it is loud. And it is cruel. And it is right.

And sometime in the last two years, you have discovered the wonderful and terrible truth that this too shall pass. You are in a season of life. This won’t last forever. And when baby turns two, you are viscerally hit with the sickening realization that it is ending sooner than you ever could have dreamed. And nothing you can do can quiet that clock. Or turn it back. Or slow it down.

So you just be in it. You are fully present in each ridiculous movie slow motion moment of each excruciatingly endless day. You laugh at the spills and falls and breaks and fights and losses because otherwise you’d cry. You say good night, good job, good luck, good God, because you know that soon enough you will be saying goodbye. You let loose and let live but don’t let on or let up because in the span of a breath you know you will be letting go. You do that season, that week, that day, that moment because that’s what you’ve got. And there’s no guarantee of any more than that.

Yeah when baby turns two, that’s something. But it doesn’t always live up to all the hype.  You don’t know quite what it is, but it’s something. Maybe it gives you pause to do more, do better, do over, do not give up! Maybe it’s a second chance before you really need one. Maybe it’s that one pivotal moment that changes everything but that you will only know for sure sixteen birthdays from now. Unequivocally, it’s loss. It’s grasping in futility at the slippery sands of time, a mother’s heart trying to outrun life itself. It’s too much love and not enough time. It’s tremendous joy and matchless sorrow very present, at the exact same moment, when baby turns two.