Here’s how it starts: you have one child who is lovely and amazing and he plays well on his own and he gives you hugs and kisess all the time and he sleeps until 9:00 every morning. Then you decide to have a second child. The second one never sleeps and mostly just cries and when he finally gets over crying all the time, he starts to take things from his brother. That’s your firstborn. You love both of these children…
Does that sound weird to you? It was strange to me, too, when I witnessed two little girls rubbing each other’s earlobes at the playground. Their mom said that she does the same thing. She’s apparently always been obsessed with earlobes. She rubs them all the time without thinking, and now her children do too. She also told me that rubbing earlobes releases oxytocin. That same night, I was sitting at church with my family. Now, you have to know something…
Last weekend I attended the West Virginia Writer’s Conference. It was the first time I’ve been away from my children overnight. And it was actually a two night stay. Did I miss them? I thought I would, but no, actually, I didn’t. And I struggled with that. I know that when we leave our children, we should immediately feel like a piece of us has gone missing. Like we aren’t complete and that if we don’t get home immediately, we might die…
When I was pregnant with my first son, I had a lot of mixed emotions, a lot of jumbled up thoughts. It’s okay though. I’m pretty sure that’s normal. Having a life of one’s own provokes a lot of emotion, so it makes sense that having a second life forming in one’s belly would provoke a lot more thought and emotion, right? I’m the baby of my family, six and a half years behind my closest sibling, and until my cousin…