Happy

Someday, days or months or decades from now, the weight of this year will roll in like a quiet storm. It will inch its way up my throat and unleash a lifetime of terror and relief, of gratitude and growth. Someday, long after the last bottle is made and the last diaper is changed and all things worth knowing have had time to steep and cure, I will wake up and have the wind knocked out of me. The rain will come in droves, a torrent of bullets, until the sky is empty and all that’s left are dampened shadows of what was and what could’ve been.

But not today. Today is for sippy cups and permission slips and piles of pink laundry. It’s for doctor’s appointments and dance class and Frozen on repeat. It’s for outgrown jammies and timeout corners and half-eaten bowls of mac n’ cheese. It’s for the biggest of personalities and the tiniest of toes, for bedtime conversation and early morning chaos. Today is for 10 PM glasses of wine and recorded episodes of This Is Us. It’s for countertops littered with bills and exhaustion so deep it makes your bones ache, for daily prayers of thankfulness that this time is different – that this time I can sleep without panicking and wake without crying.

It’s a wonderful thing to feel frazzled and full at the same time, to exist in an anarchy of split attention and shrugged shoulders. We are here. We are alive. And that is enough.

Twins

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