It’s been an hour since I’ve seen my baby.  He’s usually toddling around following one of his brothers or sometimes doing his own thing.  I hear him in the background of everything I’m doing.  This morning I’ve been writing, cleaning up the kitchen and planning a future full of amazingness. I’ve done all this while putting groceries away and making phone calls, all at once, yeah, welcome to an hour in the life. All this, while I’ve been contemplating a relationship I have and how to show up in it. Things of the heart, they take your attention, yet, I’m still aware of my kids, each one of them, always.

My 3 older kids are downstairs watching the movie Gnomes.  He’s definitely down here with them I thought.  Hmm, he’s not.  I realize it’s been longer than usual since I’ve seen him or heard him.  I feel the kind of quiet you only get when they are either gone and you hear quiet or asleep and you feel the peace of quiet; and there’s also the kind of quiet I now know the feeling of too… the quiet of dead.

At the same moment I realize he’s gone, I also know exactly where he is. I know what he’s doing and how long he’s been there.  Why?  Because I just KNOW. I head directly to where he is to confirm what I KNOW is also reality.  It is.

He’s in his bed asleep.  He put himself down for his nap.  In all his body wise intuition, he knows just what he needs. He doesn’t have the experience or understanding to say, “Hey mom, I’m tired, I’m gonna lay down for my nap now. Just so you know where I am.  Thanks!”  He doesn’t understand I’m responsible for where he is, his safety and what’s happening to him.

He’s independent.  He gets his bottle, fills it up with his favorite protein chocolate drink and climbs up into his bed for a rest.  He falls asleep. In this, his body shifts from go go go to asleep.  I feel the shift too.  Why?  We are connected.  I feel him all day.  So when I consciously realize that he hasn’t been making his little boy noises, or following me around and isn’t with brothers watching a movie; that complete silence tells me he’s either asleep or dead.

I know he’s asleep.  I know he’s in his bed and I know he’s ok.  If it were the other option, I wouldn’t have only realized it after an hour of quiet. I would have felt it within a few minutes of that same quiet feeling.  It’s not that I didn’t realize it for an hour.  It’s that I already knew he was just fine and asleep, before I noticed what I already knew.

That’s what love teaches you.  It teaches you to be aware of what is, when it is and what it means.  Parenting can be like that.  Marriage can be like that.  Any relationship where you love someone it connects you to that knowing.

When Grant left that night, I felt off.  When he died, I felt something shift and felt the quiet that comes when someone is gone. It’s a new realization of gone I learned that night, not just the gone from the house gone, the dead, quiet dead gone.  He was out of the house gone so it seemed like nothing had changed, but I knew it had, immediately.

I had not yet noticed his absence yet fully because it was still within what had always been normal. Then, when that short time passed or when he would have been home and it was still quiet, I knew.  It was 4 or 5 more hours till that was confirmed by the authorities with a 3 am ring at the doorbell , but I already knew before they got there.  It is the very reason why when they told me he was dead my response was just a breathy “yeah” and nothing else.

Today I realized it. That moment I knew my baby was safe and that he was asleep. Just like normal he had his bottle dropped to the side of his little mouth, it is empty with the remnants of chocolate milk that he poured himself, lying next to him.  I do know.

I know everything.  Not in a way that I think I’m that kind of “know it all” but when I know, I know. There’s a lot I know.  I learned in that moment, I can trust myself.  I trust what I know when I know it and because I do, I recognize more that I know more, more often and faster.