This past year I became well acquainted with my house in the dark, padding the stretch from my room to yours more times than I can count.
I also got to know places in my heart I didn’t know existed, as you burrowed in and filled it to bursting.
I’ve mastered the state of nearly asleep with an entire life balanced in my arms.
I’ve spent hours, days, memorizing every detail of your face only for time to callously change it as you grow.
I’ve changed hundreds of diapers and smiled millions of smiles.
At your laugh. At your mind. At the way you walk. At the way you point up in the air while you dance to the Law and Order theme song.
My heart has broken to pieces with each bump, and scrape and bruise and been mended just as quickly when your tiny hand reaches up to stroke my eyelashes.
I’ve sang to you thousands of times and watched you drift off to sleep just as many, somehow trusting my grasp.
I’ve carried you for miles and chased you even more.
I don’t know how I ever did my hair in the morning without you watching me from the bathroom floor, or how I ever peed without little feet pattering to find me.
You are the first thing I think about when I wake up and occasionally, in the space between sleep and wake my heart drops, worried you somehow aren’t there.
I thought I knew me before you but in thirty years, I never knew what she….I could do.
Who I was. What I was capable of.
What love was. What it meant to love someone like that.
I hope I’m the type of mom who makes you feel brave and proud.
The kind of mom you want to write about. The kind of mom who makes you feel the way I feel about you.
Like there is a tightness in my throat and a weight on my heart when I think that there was a time I didn’t know you. That there could have ever been a world without your smile or your laugh or your waking screams at 5 am.
To say I love you is to say there are a few drops of water in the ocean or a few dim lights in the sky or a few grains of sand in the desert.
I love you, I love you, I love you.
My sweet boy, my scrumpus, my chungus, my wild man, Everett Christian Jepson.
How has it only and already been one year?
