The ReeWrite

will now be accepting retirement gifts ✨

when i first told the group chat i was due in august, someone said, “oh you’ll hit the chunky baby 4 month old phase right at Christmas” and they were RIGHT. this is the happiest, CHUNKIEST, squishiest little baby and it is making this season all the more magical. 🎄❤️

we love you, pennygirl!!

Back to work tomorrow after a 16-week maternity leave and it feels like an eternity might not have been long enough. These are just such hands-on days. The needs are so physical. The mess is so tangible. The growth is so visible, day after day. And I’m not sure I’ll know what to do with my hands or my body apart from them.

They’re getting bigger, both of them. And so quickly. I feel absolutely panicked about it but there’s nothing to do. The days are passing without my approval and no matter how many times I whisper, please stop growing, as i lay them down to sleep, they don’t listen.

(Jo is getting great at not listening. Penny’s more focused on rolling at the moment but I know her time will come.)

Motherhood is so strange because for months there isn’t a single part of them that isn’t also a part of you. You are wholly intertwined, in the most visceral way.

And then the moment they arrive, they start the slow, quiet work of unwinding — learning to become their own person through tiny separations that could break you if you looked too closely.

And that’s what I can’t stop thinking about as I consider going back to work tomorrow. That I was supposed to be separating too. I was supposed to be learning how to inhabit my own life again, how to be a whole person on my own.

It just wasn’t enough time. And that’s not a comment on parental leave policies (although it could be!!!). It’s just an admission of fear, and maybe even a little failure, that I don’t know how to be in my body anymore without it being in service of these girls.

I’m sure I’ll learn, as they continue to do each day. And we’ll all adapt and adjust and be fine — because there’s grace, and because that’s what you do.

I just wish I had a little more time to not need that lesson. A little more time to just be a body belonging to them.