Unfoldings

Last night September smiled. She's smiled before, but this time it was her own smile, not ours reflected back. Dadders made silly faces at her, and played ski-jump with her upturned little nose, and tickled the little snuggle-spot between her chins, and she smiled. She smiled and smiled and smiled, a beautiful, flickering, everchanging expression of her very own delightful delight.

A new dimension of her personality is unfolding for us, shedding light on everything we knew about her before. So utterly continuous with everything we've known of her so far, and yet so surprising and unexpected. The unexpectedness of it all is not so much who she turns out to be, but the fact that it is who she was all along. Indeed, given everything we've known of her over the past months, she couldn't possibly be any other way. And yet we didn't know her, know this part of her, until last night.

It's like staring at a half-finished jigsaw puzzle in bewilderment. Suddenly, you look at the box and everything makes sense, and you no longer can comprehend how you didn't see it all along.

Birth was the same way. When I was pregnant with the twins, I was very conscious of lots of in utero bonding going on. My whole life revolved around them, so of course I felt a powerful bond. But when I was pregnant with the Persephone-child, my life still pretty much revolved around the twins, and I was dreadfully disappointed to find that I didn't really feel much of anything about the unseen little person squirming in my belly.

She was simply a part of me.

It wasn't until she was born that I realized just how well I knew her, had always known her. From time to time a look or a gesture takes my breath away with its utter familiarity. Now I see what I felt in my womb so many times, felt and hardly noticed, but oh, the memory is so clear and precious now!

Like the memory of the first time I kissed my little Isaiah, too weak and feeble and numb and scared to savor the moment...

Or maybe it was just that the moment was too big and too precious to be savoured all at once.