Raw
Posted on | December 27, 2009 | No Comments
I am already a very sensitive person, but after having my second baby all my senses seem even more raw. My sense of smell is crazy strong. Everything I see and hear drives me to distraction. I can taste everything. I can even taste the stress in my throat as the things that need to get done loom above my head- the things that cannot just be left for whenever time opens to do them…like the things that have to be done to keep my job, which provides income, which then keeps our life running- the life that is consumed with this amazing new little being…who I do not want to miss a minute of, but life has to keep moving. My first child quite grown also continues to fascinate me. In fact, I could use up all the time that exists basking in the glow from both of them – and nothing would get done. ( My husband just brought me a little pile of notes he found while cleaning up, written by my 11 year old daughter. Stapled together like a little journal, they were things to remember…one per page…” a drop of water that fell on my forehead when I was very young”…”the day I became a big sister”…she astounds me – these scraps of paper were the cut-out left behind paper from making snow-flakes…she leaves her creations everywhere. I find them like lost treasures). Yes, my children alone could swallow my time whole and I am not even talking about the time it takes to actually KEEP THEM ALIVE- like feed them, and do their laundry , and keep them bathed. I am just talking about watching them.
Then there is me and my five raw senses and the LIFE that breathes and needs, and yearns and churns. Inside me- all these things that I am feeling alone- but sometimes reach a plane of common ground on. Those rare moments when suddenly I know for sure that someone else knows exactly what I mean – and the loneliness is gone for a second. I am plugged back in to the universe outside of “I” and it feels great.
Often I am grateful for my raw amplified senses. I know it makes me appear shell-shocked sometimes, or far-away ( though I am actually too “here”), or distracted and self-absorbed ( which in a way I am…but really its myself absorbing EVERYTHING).
This son I have, though- who grew inside me and was the catalyst for all this postpartum hormonal rawness- is still so new- we are still connected in the way that I feel his breathing like my own. I taste and feel his satisfaction as he gulps milk loudly from my breasts. I smell him like his body is still part of mine 
. It is primal and raw, and sometimes even overwhelming.
This is what life is right now. I am trying to be with it as my mind reaches out its desperate tendrils to curl around all the endless ideas and expectations. All the DOS and DONTS. All the people I don’t understand and miss and long for. All the places I think of going to. All the things I wish to do and have done.
It is winter. I can let myself hibernate with my raw senses. I can be with just these small things in this huge, small world.