meditations of a blueberry

My body is not perfect. My skin is not tight and smooth. I have lumps and bumps in all the wrong places. My muscles do not make themselves known by sight alone.  My belly wiggles and jiggles when I move. I have rolls on my back and rolls on my belly. Thanks to my diastasis, my belly pouches out, likely making strangers wonder if I am currently pregnant. Even my breasts are not immune and due to aging and pregnancy, they are larger and no longer as perky as they once were. Stretch marks stretch across my belly like some sort of weird road map to nowhere, some of them still angry and red, some turned silvery. My hair has strands of silver and white peppered throughout it. No, my body is not "perfect." There are "rules" to having a perfect body, even a postpartum body, and mine does not follow them. It must be tight. It must have curves in all the right places and none in any of the "wrong" places. It must not show any signs of aging or any signs that a ...

As I sit here in the morning sun, I'm overtaken by how quickly life truly moves. It feels like it was just yesterday that we celebrated seeing seeing E on the ultrasound screen, and yet that was 7 years ago this week. 7 years later and I'm sitting holding my fourth baby, and first daughter, tightly as she naps in my arms. This morning, we walked my first child to the bus for grade 1, and he will walk home from the bus alone this afternoon. That same child stayed up late last night to finish reading the Harry Potter book we had been reading together, and he cried at the ending. Last week I registered my second child for kindergarten. That second child and my third child are currently building Lego together, getting along for the time being. And I sit in the morning light, rocking a sweet sleeping baby girl, listening to those 2 middle boys talking and laughing, in amazement at what my body has created and nourished. Miss A turns 1 in 5 weeks. It's hard to believe that last...