Come closer

4am with my baby

Welcome to Getting Better. My name is Miriam, and I share weekly personal essays to offer moments of pause and reflection from a place of hope and joy. My pieces touch on motherhood, loss, chronic illness, human nature, and more. I share all my work freely right now. Subscribe for free, or upgrade for the price of an oat milk latte — my favorite / unequivocally the best drink on any menu 🥰  Sign up here:

2023, Angie Wynne Photography

Six teeth are ripping through your gums and I try not to project my hurt onto you. It feels so cruel that you have to go through this, but for the most part, you’re doing alright. I try to remember this — to stop looking at you with all my sadness, caring too much that I intensify your discomfort. I just want your life filled with ease.

I want this so badly I could burst. (You sense this disquiet in me.)

You cling to me a little more this week, asking for my arms but then wriggling around as soon as they’re wrapped around you.

Some nights are too tender to bear alone. You’re unsettled and uncomfortable tonight, so I crawl into your bed to soothe you — nursing and snuggling and patting and shushing and singing.

You burrow into me, and then squirm and squirm, flipping right then left, right then left, slowly drifting away. You notice me next to you again and snake back over.

You giggle and smoosh your face into mine, your nose into mine. It feels like you’re trying to crawl back in through my skin, into me, to remove the falseness of this space between us.

I can’t breathe now — you’re covering my mouth with your cheek and blocking my nostrils with your own.

I try to suck in a small sip of air, but instead find a damp heat that suffocates me.

I should shift my head, but I don’t want to. All I can think is, You’re smothering me. Come closer.

You sense my thoughts and burrow with a renewed force.

It’s 4am now. We’re tired, but the buzz of our energies melding back into one is enough to keep us both awake — tossing and turning, nuzzling and burrowing, giggling and grunting — for another hour.

It’s enough to keep me awake for another lifetime.

This one feels truncated — someone dropped me here a little too early, starting my clock far too soon. There shouldn’t have been a life before you; there couldn’t have been.

I was never meant to be here without you.

I drift off in this space — mind settling somewhere between the unfairness of before and the desperation for more, for eternity.

When I wake up, it’s to your smile inches away from my own, and my heart spills over with joy and tears for what one day I’ll miss. But I recognize this as another falseness of separation; a trick my greedy mind plays on my heart.

Good morning, lovebug — we’re still here.

Forever in this lifetime, and in the next.