Sleeping With Angels

My little boy is sleeping next to me.  Nearly every night one of my boys asks, “Mom, can I sleep with you?” The question always gives me conflict.  I see you.  A tiny person who wants to be close to the big person who makes you feel safe.  Who is safe.  The one who they know is their ‘home.’  I fully understand I am their safe place. 

I know this also because when my child lays down next to me, I can feel his heartbeat calm. I hear his breathing deepen. I feel his energy shift to a feeling of its ok, I’m safe, and I’m by my mom. It is a blessing to be that for my boys. 

 When I want to be alone, to just be, and escape the heavy burden of being the only one left for them that will ever be this safe of a place while they are so little; I feel sad that I can’t do it every night. 

When the boys do sleep with me, and if they wake in the night, they reach over, to see if I’m there.  When they touch me, and know that I’m close, they don’t move again, and just go back to sleep. Of course I notice the little person there in my sleep.

They all sleep longer into the morning if they are with me.  They are released from the feeling of ‘get up and go, see what’s out there, what’s going on?’  That radar is replaced with, ‘I’m happy next to mom, and I want to stay here, not get away.’ 

 I can only do 1 kid in my bed at a time.  I need my sleep too.  Not just need, require.  It’s not the same as the needed sleep before Grant died, where if I had a bad night, I could make it up the next night.  Now there is no next night, only right now.  If I don’t get it, I miss it.  All the chances for make ups are gone. 

There comes a point when you realize what is, is what is.  That’s a sobering reality.  When you come to this realization, your life perception changes forever.  You know that this moment is all you have.  

I used to have a saying I’d put in my calendar, ‘today is all we have.’ The day after Grant died, I realized how true that is.  I knew it before he died, but this was a whole new depth of knowledge.  There was something in me, guiding me to the truth that I hadn’t yet fully understood until I watched another human’s last day on earth.

To wake to the next day as the finality of, ‘it is over’ sink in.  There would be no more tomorrow’s with or for him.  And truly, there isn’t for me or you either. Today is all we have.  And if you don’t know that, you’ll live today over and over again, never moving on to tomorrow, because you haven’t learned your lessons of this day.  Your body will grow older, but you won’t have learned yet what today is meant for.  

 All the things you think are important are not.  All the things you need to get done, you don’t.  Because when you live your last day, those things you neglected because you had something important to do, they don’t ever get done and nobody cares. Everything you were working on stops.  It’s all over because you can’t take any of it with you, it just stays how you left it. 

All you’ll have, and all you leave, is the memory of how you made those around you feel. How I felt with my husband is what I am left with.  Memories that are burned into my heart now, not because of what happened, but how I felt.  And those feelings don’t fade.  In fact the feelings get stronger as the memories fade.  All of those feelings.   

So tonight my little boy sleeps in my bed and he feels safe and loved.  I know it.  I can feel it.  And I know that what I’m leaving him with in this moment is the love of a mother who knows how important the memory of how you made someone feel, will forever overshadow anything you ever did.