Bill Withers and Baby

Brand new.
Or a few months old?
It’s all a blur when you’re in the trenches of sudden motherhood, day in and day out. You can’t take a nap, a shower, have a proper shit, or bout of food poisoning without tending to the tiny orb of consciousness clinging to your every move.

So I brought you in the bath with me.

And I wondered why you didn’t smile often. I wondered if it was my fault. Am I too… something? Too unloving? Distracted? Despondent or shocked by my new reality?

I hoped it had nothing to do with me, but mostly I hoped you would be fine. That you would start smiling and giggling and doing all of those things that people told me babies would do.

(I brought you in the bath with me.)

I held you in my lap and cupped water over your hairline. You clutched at my chest and every piece of skin you could find above the water. You looked panicked for a moment. I felt my temperature rise, my heart rate quicken; my insides prepping for a cacophony of your wails and my whys and “this was supposed to be calming and precious” — and then the speaker let out a new melody.

“Just the Two of Us” by Bill Withers.
I looked down at you and smiled. You had a mouthful of life, and eyes like marbles in a game of jacks. You let it go between your teeth and you twinkled. You smiled back. Right at me. With love in your pupils and a giggle in your belly, just waiting for a moment.
I didn’t move a muscle — scared to ruin a perfect thing.
And even though then, there were three of us, and we were good, and we were happy, I knew I would remember forever the moment you smiled at me while it was just the two of us. I made an effort to store the image away in some prominent fold of my brain matter. I knew that I would snapshot that smile, that look, those bare gums with a shard of tooth; that white in the eye sparkle and glitter.

I didn’t have any way of knowing then how much it would comfort me in five years — when it was really just the two of us. I never knew that life could foreshadow life.

But I know now, and I would die to live that moment again and again — would die to live every moment the two of us haven’t shared yet but will.
Just the two of us. We can make it on our own.

Maybe you always knew. Maybe your unexpected smile was laying the groundwork for the things I would need to cling to, to survive the apocalypse of love. But you will always be my reason, my oxygen mask, the joy I borrow when I have none.

There is no sunshine when you’re gone.

And I’m soaking it up, like bubbles on my skin, until the day you’re always gone too long: no longer my baby in a bathtub but a woman in the world.

And even then, when you’re far away with a life of your own,

I will close my eyes and remember when it really was

Just the two of us.