Babies don't keep

Many years ago, my mother clipped a poem from a women's magazine and taped it to her dresser mirror. The last lines of the poem went:

The cleaning and scrubbing
will wait till tomorrow,
for children grow up,
as I've learned to my sorrow.
So quiet down, cobwebs.
Dust go to sleep.
I'm rocking my baby, and babies don't keep.

My mom had seven babies, so there were lots of cobwebs at our house. But I always remembered that little poem.

When my babies were little, I rocked them and thought to myself, "Remember this moment. Remember holding your baby. Remember how her head smelled and how her little body felt in your arms. Soon she'll be too big to hold and you won't be able to imagine that she was ever this small."

I remember thinking this, but it's hard now to remember actually holding them. They really did grow up fast. Bess was 10 months old when we met her and Ella was 12 months. Two months after we brought them home, they were walking, feeding themselves, and starting to talk. I missed their infancy. I held them as long as I could, but they wanted to be up and doing things. There were things to learn and explore. They became toddlers overnight. And May was 8 when she arrived, her babyhood lost to all of us including herself.

I wish I'd asked Big A to take more pictures of me holding my babies. It would be nice to have proof that I did it, because now I'm second-guessing myself: Did I hold them enough? Did I spend too much time on cleaning and scrubbing, or God forbid, computing? Why is it so hard to imagine them being that little? I can look at pictures of my girls when they were babies, and I see in those tiny faces the big girls they have become. But I can't remember what it was like to look down and see a little face gazing up at me from knee-height, or how it felt to pick up a squirmy 17-pound body. My memory is obscured by the 100-pound teenager who is standing in front of me right now.

I was right to think that they would grow up fast. But I was wrong to think that they would become too big to hold. While we're sitting on the sofa together, one or two or all three girls sidle close to me. They rest their heads on my shoulders and creep onto my lap. In front of their friends, they give me a brusque goodbye; safe at home, they grab my hands when I tuck them in and pull me back onto the bed. "You will always be my baby," I tell them. Even May.

When my mother comes to visit, as she did on Mother's Day, she sits close to me on the sofa and wraps her arms around me and tells me I was her first baby. I'm bigger than she is. If I tried to sit on her lap, I think I'd break her. But if she could hold me, she would. I understand that now.