October 2005

I am a small container and I spill over all within me that I can’t keep underneath myself. There is too much love when I touch him, his little curls, his tiny body, his soft skin under cotton pajamas with tiny dinosaurs and long green pants. He is utterly perfect, and so much more than I can imagine being able to love. My love is too much for me, and never enough to fill what I want to fill in his life. He is the sun, moon, stars, every cliche, and I don’t care. I’ve never loved until now. No lover, husband, man, father, person, endeavor measures up. They were all a big waste of time, marking time until the ultimate love in my little Blake’s tiny, short little life. Biology sucks, and it’s not everything. It’s not anything. We are just a place for the spirit to squeeze themselves into, and my spirit is so much bigger than me, my love so much more than me that I can’t deliver it except in flowing tears as I hold his sleeping body across my legs, aching to be the same spirit, aching to raise him up above the world and say it is all his. He is the world, my world, and more than any dream I deferred when I deferred the ultimate love in my life. I beg my mother for lessons on how she loved. I know now why she drank — it wasn’t the despair, the lack of love, but the utter pain of having too much love for the world to bear, more love than perhaps a child needs. The burden of being a mother is to handle the overflow. And I am such a small container.