Written yesterday at 4:43PM

Last night, as I tried to fall asleep with my daughter wrapped around me, our legs intertwined, her hands cupping my face, I found myself wondering not when this would end, but how much longer I would get to keep it.

Because I am tired, yes. Deeply tired. But I also never want it to end.

My daughter is three years and eight months old. For a while now, I’ve been saying she is three and a half, but that is no longer really true. She is closer to four than to three, which feels impossible and offensive and correct.

Most nights, we find each other. Sometimes I scoop her up and bring her into the guest room so that we do not wake my son or husband. Sometimes she finds her way into our bed on her own, crawling in beside me so that we share a pillow and everything else, including breath.

I didn’t always know I wanted to be a mother. There was no lifelong maternal urge in me, no certainty. And then one day, my light turned on, as they say (or maybe that is just something my mom has said).

Now I feel toward my children something so primal it seems to exist beneath language. A longing for closeness so intense that, in my most exhausted moments, I can feel some ancient part of me wanting to gather them back inside my body. Not because motherhood is easy. Not because I am well-rested. But because I am already nostalgic for it while it is still happening.

Maybe that is why today unfolded the way it did.

I am tired because I did not get one full REM cycle. I am tired because Sienna moved like a modern dancer all night, eventually sprawled diagonally across the length of me, her remarkably exquisite long locks covering my eyes. In hindsight, that part was helpful. Our room is too bright.

Today, instead of powering through one more thing I had to do, or should have done, I took a nap.

I took a nap and did not feel guilty.

Before seeing my one client of the day, I meditated so I could be fully present with her. And now, instead of prepping for my PTA presentation or tomorrow’s Double Shift session, I am writing this because the words need to be released.

And I wonder if the problem is not that life keeps interrupting my work, but that life is the interruption.

Later tonight, I may slump down the stairs after bedtime and wonder how on earth I am supposed to finish everything.

But for now, I am here, behind on everything and exactly where I need to be as hackneyed as that sounds, which it really does.

And maybe that is not failure. Maybe that is what makes a life.