Endings, Beginnings

I was sharing the bed with Elise tonight.  Smoothing down her hair.  Watching her stretch.  Then the water works started.  She is starting school in 14 days.  I'd note the exact hours and minutes but that would be down right embarrassing.

Lately when I look at her, I gaze long and hard, taking in every detail.  I want to pour her in a cup and drink her up.

Did I read enough stories?  Do enough puzzles?  Have enough tea parties?  Tickle enough?  Laugh enough?  It's all slipping through my fingers like sand.

Wasn't five children and fourteen years enough?  Right now, it doesn't seem so.

I loved the gentle rhythm of the days.  Mealtimes, nap time, baths and bedtime with walks, playgrounds and toys sprinkled in.  I can still remember the reality of three children under the age of four.  Mess and chaos.  The gentle rhythm felt more like waves crashing on the shore threatening to pull me under.  But looking back that mess and chaos seem now as sweet as the jam I didn't have time to wipe from the counter.  As sweet as the syrup Anne always managed to get in her hair.  Sweet as bananas and cereal dribbling down baby chins.

The expanse from 8-3 has never looked so vast.  I remember the days when I would dream of time and space for myself.  To think.  To breathe.

It is quite a coincidence that Winnie-the-Pooh is in the movie theater again this summer.  If ever there was a romantic view of childhood and the magical years before school, this is it.  I was thinking about taking Elise to see it.  Actually, I guess I want her to take me.  I don't know if I can make it through the end without completely losing it:

And so we come to the last chapter, in which Pooh 

and Christopher Robin go to the 

enchanted part of the forest, and we say goodbye. 

Winnie-the-Pooh says, "Goodbye? Oh no, please. 

Can't we just go back to page one 

and start all over again?"

Sorry, Pooh, but all stories have an ending, you know.
 

"Oh, bother."

Right now, turning this page and ending a chapter seems so hard.  I have never been good with goodbyes.  Ask my mom.  If I stay in one place for five minutes, I am emotionally attached.  Being in this "place" for fourteen years, It is only natural to be sad.

“What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an
end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.”
~T.S. Eliot~  

So.  This fall, first, I will cry.  Then I will breathe.  Then I will think.  Then I will begin.  What?  I don't know.  Stick around and see.

Dina