What I think about at 4:16 a.m.

I dream of Avi sleeping through the night so I can get some decent sleep. She's 13 and a half months old now and she still wakes up anywhere between 2-5 times a night to feed. Lately, she's been doing better at sleeping. Now, some nights when I'm lucky, she'll only wake me two times! Last night, I fell asleep at 11:00pm. At 11:13 p.m. she woke up and so did I. Then, a blessed thing happened: she slept until 4:46 a.m.! Well, it would have been divine if I hadn't woken up at 4:16 a.m. wondering why she hadn't woken up in hours to feed! So, I laid there (knowing she was going to wake me up the second I fell asleep) and thought about how much I miss her. Even though she is just in the next room over, and I just breast-fed her 5 hours ago, and I will see her all day long, I missed her intensely. I felt so lonely. I began to mourn her growing up and going to school someday. My husband lay asleep next to me, and his quiet slumber added to my loneliness. I recounted how everyday Avi grows farther and farther away from me. At one time, she was literally as close as another person can be to another person: inside my womb. Then she was born, and in that few fleeting last seconds of birthing, as she slipped a million miles an hour out of me - we grew monumentally further from each other. I held her all day long and slept next to her all night long for that first half year. Then she was ready for her own bed. And then she was ready to be put down on the ground to play on her own. Then she was crawling, crawling towards things and away from me (and then back to me). Now she is walking. Soon she'll be running. Then driving. Then flying...

I guess all this pondering makes me realize I really don't mind her waking me up in the middle of the night. I treasure picking up her little body in my arms in the twilight dusk, curling up on the mattress in her room, while she impatiently sucks a mid-night snack and while I bury my nose into her fine, barely-there hair, breathing in deeply, trying to inhale those remaining wisps of her newborn self which are now just a memory. A bittersweet memory. This time, in the middle of the night while the rest of the world sleeps, is our time. Just Avi and me, together, hanging out. My hope is that we will continue to have precious times - just the two of us - as she gets older: a young girl, a teenager, an adult and woman, and maybe even when she is a mother of her own. Let's just not continue to do it at 1:00 a.m., okay!