6 p.m. Nat sat dead center on the white living room couch, knees to chest, staring ahead of him. So peaceful. I was not feeling peaceful, I was in a lot of turmoil. Not a good day for me. I have a lot of trouble transitioning to the weekends, with all of the unstructured downtime and everyone around when I’m used to being by myself. A lot of stuff has been going on in my head and heart lately and I was feeling tossed by my emotional discomfiture.<\/p>\n
So there was Nat, an island of quiet. Demanding nothing. Soaking up the early evening hour. As usual. I stood behind him and knelt over him, my hair spilling into his face. I kissed the top of his head. He smelled like oily skin and strawberry shampoo.<\/p>\n
Then he surprised me: he reached up and wrapped my hair around his hands, very gently, and pulled it to his nose, breathing deeply. Breathing me in.<\/p>\n
“Natty, do you like that? You like my hair like that, in your face?”
“Yes,” he said, a big grin stretching across his face.
“I didn’t know, Honey.” I felt a quick stab of pain as I realized that here was something easy I could have been doing with him for all this time, some happy thing I could have given to him so easily had I known. Had I tried sooner.<\/p>\n
I sighed, and looked at his long fingers, clutching at my hair so gently but also so definitely. He wanted me. He still loved me, I was still Mommy. The wonder of it spread through me, soothing my heart.<\/p>\n
We just sat there like that for a few long moments, as his soft silence wrapped itself around me, and I was content.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
6 p.m. Nat sat dead center on the white living room couch, knees to chest, staring ahead of him. So peaceful. I was not feeling peaceful, I was in a lot of turmoil. Not a good day for me. I have a lot of trouble transitioning to the weekends, with all of the unstructured downtime […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1440","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pSTth-ne","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1440","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1440"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1440\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}