Is It Just Me?

I cling desperately to the evidence of longer daylight hours. It's somehow so exciting, the prospect of more time under the sun. This year, it almost seems to announce our impending freedom.

It's just so oppressively 'Hibernate', the early darkness mixed with breath-stealing cold. You know the cold... it freezes your nosehairs together within seconds of emerging from the violent cloud of heat as you and it pours out of your house. Gahg. Everything you touch seems to scream of fear that it's going to break - your car, the screen door, even your boots protest with loud squeaks across hard-packed snow.

By why on earth am I contemplating such things on an unseasonally warm day. Even while I revel in the rare luxury of breathing in warm moist air tonight, I know the truth. It'll be one slick guantlet on the roads in the morning!

We've had more teething setbacks and the alarm bells went off when he spiked a little teething fever. "Better safe than sorry". They need a parrot on the floor. This round with the teeth has incited more abrupt and discouraging results. I had to laugh at myself as I thought of how a severe diaper rash is often a parents' first object of helplessness and heartbreak. It took me a minute to remember that it wasn't our first. That is the gift of time, I suppose. Already, it dulls and rounds the acute points of trials endured, helps to (almost) forget and march on to the next mountain.

I have a personal goal that I hope to master in the coming year. If I cannot do it in that time, I fear an undesireable pattern will be set. I want to make an effort not to "wear" this event of my family's. You know the people who cling to tragedies through their lives, brandishing them about as though they were a physical shield that allowed them a pass. I'm not naturally the loud martyr-type, but alone in my room, so to speak, I really feel the deepness of this particular hit to my whole. Even as we are a success, and even as I appreciate how many people don't get to keep their babies, even as I appreciate how much harder others have to fight, I mourn all that he's already been through. I feel it is a selfish indulgence but I cannot help it.

It's almost over.