It's like walking around in a photograph with the colors dialed up too high in Photoshop, this life right now. The first baby demands my attention vehemently. His due date hovers; appointments are made for that day, a summer show premiers, and then his birthday winks at me from around the corner, duly noted with joy and dread.
And all the small reminders still lurk, like the stray blue pillowcases from the sheets that were on the bed when he was born. I was wrapped in one sheet and placed in an ambulance, it was discarded at the hospital. But the pillowcases remain, a scattered remnant of a night relived again and again. Those summer shows are coming back, the ones I watched in the waning days of slow motion and relaxation, waiting for signs, being tricked nightly as contractions would wax and then wane. A basket full of cards, relocated for painters, but carefully placed back out, isn't ready to be put away.
But these two coming after shine with equal intensity. Their movements demand acknowledgement as they grow and their space is slowly becoming restricted. This body aches and complains with the sudden changes of two where only one was meant to live, and preparations must be made. That in itself is like mixing a set of the most brightly hued paints, swirling in a bucket as I sob over the clothes he never wore, but must smile and plan for his siblings to take up the task.
There are cribs to set up, the changing table will come back down and sit in the place where it stood the day he was born. The cradle will resume a spot at the end of my bed and the thought of it there makes me ache as if I were being torn to shreds, but then Red kicks me so hard I gasp, and Green wiggles into a rib. It isn't even that I can't figure out how to love the three of them, but that loving them is so demanding right now. It is intense in every way, there are no quiet days to muse, there is always something big and bright and glowing with the intensity of the sun to spin my poor heart this way and then that. Everything is so very big, so very important, so very right. this. minute.
It's hard to steal the minutes to dedicate to one or the other. I used to do that a lot, just give Joel all of me for a sneaky half hour, sitting in the nursery, rocking in the chair where we never cuddled, crying into a blanket made for the boy I talk to all day long, sobbing apology after apology and doting on thoughts of reunion. Just missing him and doing nothing else, loving him and wanting him and losing myself in being his mother here without him. Or squealing with delight at the two munchkins who wiggle and squirm and have soccer tournaments in my torso, letting them be my sole focus, promising them more, vowing to get it right, believing they will make it and dreaming of a twosome wandering with the Daddy and me on our adventures.
Now that feels impossible. Neither will allow me a moment with the other and I'm not angry, just torn and sad and exhausted from leaping from massive emotion to massive emotion. This time of year is so clearly reminiscent of when Joel was here, it feels like it should be all his but this burgeoning belly isn't his anymore, it belongs to Red and Green. I want Joel to have all of me, I feel like he deserves it and missing him right now demands that and more. I want Red to have all of me, my second son deserves no less than my first and his rabid objections to all things cold and enthusiasm for Kool-Aid and yogurt demand it as well. And Ms. Green should have all of me too. The daughter I somehow never imagined I'd have should have a raptly devoted mother, attentive to making sure her entrance is never foreshadowed by anyone, let alone those two silly boys, no one will put my baby in a corner.
So I wander these days, exhausted, looking backward and forward in a perpetual state of high emotion and whiplash. Pregnant and mourning, alone and surrounded, Mother to three and to none.