Reflections at 4:47 am.

I’m up. Again. I’ll be useless by 11 am unless I have 2 super-duper coffees (one of them black) in the first half of the day.

I don’t mind waking up ahead of time. I like the near-solitude that the apartment offers. The offspring is sleeping in some odd modernistic dance pose and the husband is just blissfully asleep. People look very different when they sleep. You either cringe or look lovingly at them. No middle path there am afraid.

I am FILLED with love for my child when he’s asleep. The curl of his lashes, the pucker of his mouth and I notice everything about him; the crud in the corner of his eyes, a small spot of toothpaste he didn’t properly rinse off his chin and usually how his pajama bottoms are gradually heading north of his ankles.

A few days ago I was (yet again) deleting stuff from my email account because it was close to being full and I really didn’t know if I wanted to fork over money every  month for more space yada yada yada. I found some utterly delicious videos of my kid. Sadly they were taken with the sturdy, never-let-you-down-hardware-wise-but-otherwise-with-a-lame-ass camera Nokia I used to tote around before Samsung Galaxy came and changed my life for the better.

So there I was unearthing these treasures which I’d totally forgotten about…these grainy videos of him while still diaper-clad and with the requisite amount of baby fat when comes in the subject of those videos in present day avatar- lean, bucktoothed and with his run-of-the-mill dino t-shirt and asks me why am I going “awww” and smiling at my laptop so much. I tell him am looking at videos of him when he was a little(r) boy and it’s making me happy to remember those times. All sorts of maternally feelings are going on in my head with the past and present right in front of me and the world seems awash in those pretty shades from the color palettes which mothers apparently see when they feel a surge of love for their kids.

He looks over my shoulder, with his surprisingly pointy chin digging into my shoulder bone and says “I was a cute baby” and with the same breath telling me to move over somewhere else because he wanted to watch something on tv and my exclamations were too loud for him.

And just like that, in a snap, your maternal feelings evaporate and you longingly look at that diapered bum running around, chin all shiny from drool, making  bird and airplane noises and wish he was back just for a little bit. Instead you leave circa 2011 behind and face 2016 with semi-resignation and just plant your butt more firmly into the couch and say I was here first! And before the whiny and knee-jerk “Nooooo” starts off, you get your ‘talk-to-the-hand’ face and gesture in place and get back to viewing that chubby kid who ate everything under the sun and was cute as a button. This dinosaur-loving one could just do with cooling his jets for a wee bit!

Main Tenet of Dealing with Nostalgic Moms- NEVER mess with the nostalgia process…it brings forth the inner dragon; complete with fire and brimstone. And the claws.