The Magnetism

He doesn't let me hold him much anymore. He reaches for Daddy. Even when he's hurt. Even in the middle of the night, he'll scream louder if I'm the one that comes in. My older sisters (seasoned mothers) tell me it's normal. Unfair and normal. To see Daddy is special, to see Mommy is expected. 

I decided to go off my anti-depressants around the same time I stopped nursing him. What a decision; absolute and willful destitution of dopamine. 

It's been since then that the slow ache of the world seems to coincide with the ache for the bond with my baby. 

It's like my entire chest feels like a negative charge- repelling everything around me with a pressure that seems magnetic and inevitable in its power.  

Lately, I've been sneaking into his room just 5 or 10 minutes before he needs to wake from his nap. I pick his ever-growing body up like he's a newborn and hold him to me. Still sleeping, he lets me. I bury my face in his thin, wispy blonde hair. I hold my lips to his forehead. I inhale deeply until our breathing synchronizes just like it used to. I hold him, tightly. Like I'm warding off Time as if She's trying to steal his baby-ness from me.  

I let his positive charge in the weight of his body cling to my negative charge. Powerful. Magnetic. Opposite. Weighted blanket vs. an elephant on my chest.

Sometimes it gets me through the day.   

Today, it didn't last long. 

He was up and out of my arms in a flash. In 10 short minutes, he was back to his toddler-ness; tracking crumbs, climbing on counters, and biting his brother. And I was back to suppressing a scream. A magnetically negative, pressurized, chemically-deficient, feminine-ragey scream.

 





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