Second Child

Much to my surprise, I found this photo on my camera a couple of days ago. It took me a few minutes to figure out just how it got there. Alena Mae snapped it during this weekend's visit to the park.

At first, it would seem like dumb luck. But I have given it a lot of thought, and I conclude that luck has nothing to do with it. Sure, it may have seemed, to the casual observer, that Lena was simply eating the camera. But look closely. She has, in a wonderful way, captured my likeness and a great deal of truth, all from her still blossoming perspective. And my little artist, she has captured the essence of me as a mother in a way that I never would have understood, had I not seen this photograph.

This is what Lena sees when she is being carried by me, or when she is resting in the sling, or when she is sitting in my lap. She looks up to this face, this woman, who is too often paying attention to other things and other people. She looks up to find this distracted human being – gazing at Elias, playing with him, watching him on the playground. Lena seeks my attention and instead finds me scanning the parking lot for cars, talking to the other mothers, hunting for items on the aisles in the grocery store, explaining the world to her brother, forever looking away. She paws at my face and my hair and my earrings to get my attention but she fails repeatedly.

I imagine that she knows my nostrils, the underneath of my chin, the inside of my neck, my cheekbones better than any part of me, better no doubt than I would like to admit. This is Lena’s mother. This is what I am. Her mother, a mother of two. She is our second child.

She wears big brother’s clothes and shoes. She sleeps in his crib. She plays with his toys. She lives in a room painted yellow by parents who were expecting a different child. She lives in a house with walls that host twice as many hangings of her brother than of her. Daily, I hold her like this, at breast-level or in my lap and I give her what I can to occupy her, a rattle, her rainbow fish, sometimes the camera or my cell phone, so I can tend to other things, other people, other moments before they flit by.

I actually like this picture of me and I can't say that about many pictures. But I wish very much that I had been looking down at her with love and affection. I wish I had been giving her my complete and undivided attention when she seized the moment with that click, just to know that it happens, just to have some proof that she has been on the receiving end of what I know Elias has received so often.

When I got pregnant with her, I was completely under the spell of my firstborn, still a baby himself. I worried it would be impossible to love another child with the same depth. I worried about whether it would be fair to her, about how I could be fair to her. I worried in general. Would I love my second child enough?
I absolutely do.