Tired too, Mom

Remy doesn't like going to bed.  I can't blame him, his life is pretty good. But tonight, as I sat in the green rocking chair in the corner of his room, his blue light stars glowing on the ceiling, he asked me for one more song and I said, "Remy, I'm just going to sit here, I'm too tired." and then I heard him take a big suck of milk from his Nemo cup and say to me from his firetruck bed, "Tired too, Mom." I've never heard Remy admit he was tired, but we sat there in the stillness between waking and sleeping and listened to the little slurps of Thea nursing, and then, without another word, he was asleep.

I may have been frazzled 70% of this day, maybe even a little woebegone enough so to leave the vacuum out with the cord lazily snaking its way across the living room floor hours after I vacuumed, but for that small moment Remy and I understood each other in the most gratifying way. Not so much as son and mother, but just as humans beings tumbling forward across a wild existence and doing our best to be good.  I thought about the moment when Remy got dressed up in his Superman costume and ran out to play this afternoon, but none of the big kids wanted to play, and I thought about how hard it can be to bumble and broil, and feel terribly proud and lost and then in love in a washy sunset of emotions every day.

I am tired.  New babies are better by a million than the best Christmas present you ever received, but they make you tired, and there a a myriad of things in this world that make us tired. I guess that is also the most lovely part about what we do: the fact that we've done it until it makes us so tired that all we can do is rock and be quiet for a few minutes at the end of the day.  Thank goodness for friends like Remy who are wise enough to understand and simply say, "me too, Mom, me too."