I like that Brad Paisley song, especially the video with Andy Griffith, where he is waiting for his wife in the mall.
Alicia waited for her second child, Lydia, for nine months. Well, maybe you could say Alicia waited for Lydia for twenty-five years. I don't know.
Alicia and husband Josh are packing up Lydia to bring her home (she's two days old now). My husband, David and I, along with my mother-in-law, Brenda, are at Josh and Alicia's with new big brother Micah, all waiting for little sister's arrival.
These days are fleeting for Alicia and Josh. Micah will be a year old tomorrow. Lydia is already two days old, though we thought the day would never actually come. My own baby is twenty-five. My other baby turns twenty-seven next week.
Geez.
There's a bitter sweetness to holding Lydia that I didn't feel with Micah, I suppose because he is a boy. I look earnestly into Lydia's face searching for my own little daughter in the turn of her chin and in the glint of her eye. Of course, at this stage, we all just see whatever we want to see in her.
My memories of Alicia at this age are sketchy at best. As someone who (apparently) has a strange, visual memory of literally thousands of intricate details from my childhood and past, this is very odd for me. It's a gap in memory that haunts and saddens me.
I had left a horrible job and then started a brand new one just a week after giving birth. I had a two-year-old, a newborn baby, a home to take care of and seemingly endless amounts of work to do. I was twenty-three years old and exhausted beyond anything I've ever experienced since.
Yet, there was this little puddle of a baby with olive skin and beautiful, huge black eyes...
And a two-year-old that never stopped talking...
Those first months with Alicia barely exist in my mind except for a few isolated incidents and many of those are the negative experiences which, only God knows why, always seem to stay with us.
So, now, I look for my baby Alicia in baby Lydia and realize all over again that I can't remember my own Alicia very much.
Beautiful beautiful Lydia.
Beautiful beautiful Alicia.
Oh but it's a sad sad thing and it's a lovely thing, too.
And so it is.
With this little baby, I will remember these short days all the days of my life. This baby I will see clearly and strive to remember. I can't reclaim those lost days and weeks and months with Alicia, but I can remember this baby, this time, these days and these months. And so, Lord willing, I will.
