Soft to Hard in Cycles

I lay in bed with our youngest one recent lazy morning. As he smiled around his sucked soggy thumb I noticed how it remains pudgy, despite his all too quick escape from toddlerhood. All of his digits still a bit stumpy and soft in that delicious baby-like way. I cupped my own increasingly spindly fingers around his plump sweet cheek and wished for one satisfied moment that all could stay just this way for more than the usual little while.

The elder, three years and a lifetime beyond the smaller, won't cuddle unless unconscious. His curves, in contrast, have stretched and lengthened leaving sharp points and broad expanses in their place. All elbows and knees and an inexplicable sharpness that pokes and prods. When you manage to wrap your arms around him for a brief and short lived hug, he wriggles and winds his way out, escaping with a prick and a stick.

And then there's my own. My form, previously tight and poky in all the right places. Hip bones, once evident, lay well below the surface. Midriff, having expanded and contracted in the beauty of pregnancy, birth and beyond is supple and soft and showing more than I yet know how to accept. Other parts falling into a new place, lower and squishier than before, living proof of a body well spent in the pursuit of love of happiness.

If I'm lucky I will be hard again, the bones of my body pointy and spiky with age. Living proof of the cycle of soft to hard and back again.