This is Jasper:

Jasper needs a haircut, or so I’m told. I don’t want to cut his hair. I firmly, emphatically, passionately do not want to cut his hair. Because the moment that I cut his hair, he will turn into a little boy. I know this. The moment that his floppy, fluffy, messy baby locks are shorn, he will lose all of his babyness and turn immediately into the toddler that I know he is but am resisting acknowledging. My heart plummets, plummets, into my heels when I think of this. I cannot stand it. I want him – need him – to be a baby for just a little while longer.

Which, I suppose, is a kind of Delilah-complex in reverse. I want to keep him small and needy and dependent by not cutting his hair. Cutting his hair will effect a transformation – and a kind of empowerment, if we consider the advancing development of small children as empowering to children, which, as any parent who has found him or herself collapsed on the living room floor while their child runs circles around them knows is absolutely the case – that I cannot bear – cannot yet bear – to witness. And this, I know, is cowardly, and unfair to Jasper, who is rattling the chains of his footie jammies and his binky and his mop of hair and demanding, demanding, to be BIG. To be BOY.

I need to let him, don’t I?

So do I cut his hair, or hang on a little longer? I so want to hang on a little longer. But… I should cut it, right?

Right?

This shit is hard.

(Props to Katie for the beautiful pic, shot on our road-trip at the Hat Creek Ranch in BC.)

(I still need help explaining death to the girl. And dinosaurs. And the relationship of dinosaurs to God. HALP.)

I am overwhelmed, today – and was overwhelmed yesterday, and the day before that, and am certain that I will be similarly overwhelmed tomorrow – with this singular thought: I do not want my boy to grow up.

I don’t. I just don’t. I know that his future is bright and amazing and that the him that he will be in that bright and amazing future is a him that I will adore with every ounce of the intensity that I adore him now, and then some, but.

But.

At this precise moment in time I am so love with Baby Him, with his soft, pale curls and his baby-tooth grin and his chubby baby bum and his tiny, grabby fists that clutch and hold and cling and the fact that I can press him to me and just hold, just hold on and breathe him in and pretend that we are still two pieces of one body, that I could, if I wanted to, press him back into my chest to beat as my own heart. This him, this incarnation of the human being that he is, this small, precious, sweet-smelling clutchable form of him – this I want to keep. This I want not to lose.

I know that this is impossible; wrong, even. I know that I should rejoice in the fact that he grows, he thrives, he marches – he leaps! he runs! he tumbles! – steadfastly forward into his own future. And I do, I do rejoice in this, just as I have rejoiced in the transformation of his sister from baby into girl. But I also mourn.

This is a truth about being a parent that nothing and no-one can prepare you for: that it is a continual experience of loss, a never-ending stream of moments of goodbye. That from the moment your children come into your life you are losing them. That the person your child is today is a person you will never meet again, a person that you will, in some ways, forget, as he or she is replaced by new people, bigger people, faster people, people with more words, people with more independence, people whose primary purpose is to move continually away from you. I look at Emilia and I can barely remember who she was as a baby; that baby, that her, is gone and obscured in the fog of my memory. I adore the girl that she is, of course, and the woman that she will become, but still: sometimes I miss that baby. Sometimes I miss that baby with an ache so deep that I feel it in my toes.

And so when I look at Jasper these days, when I watch him toddling and stumbling and pitching his fat little self forward, eager, into his sunlit future, I feel that ache and although I try to push it down, to push it away to make room for the joy of racing forward to meet the Jasper that he is becoming, I keep failing, and instead of pushing it away I let it sit in my belly like a weight and hold me still while I squeeze him to me, my baby, and try to freeze time for an eternity.

Or more.

*********

Because I am forgetting, and regretting that I forget: Wordless Wednesdays over at Their Bad Mother are henceforth going to be Wordless This Wednesday In History Wednesdays. Because, this. I need to cling to this.

Join me if you feel so inspired.

I could not blog light-heartedly this evening.

You may not know Rob, or his blog, How About Two. Or maybe you do know him, and have followed the stories of his wife’s pregnancy with twins, and his efforts to prepare himself for fatherhood. But whether you already know him, or don’t yet know him, you should know this: he’s one of us, a parent who is embracing parenthood with his words. And he, and his wife, his family, have just suffered a devastating loss.

Please, go and visit. Send whatever love that you can. Offer warmth and hugs and good, strong wishes for the well-being of their hearts. Help them say goodbye to the angel that has flown, and say hello (joy-filled hellos! for she is an occasion for much joy!) for the living angel that remains in their arms.

And tell Rob thank you for sharing his child’s life and death. For sharing his story, and his grief. Say thank you, because his words remind you to be so, so grateful for the children that you carry in your arms. And because the fullness of love that surrounds Rob’s son’s life and death – so beautifully shared with all of us – remind you that true love lives always, eternally, in the heart.

Much love to you, Barron family. Much love, and thanks.