I would like to invite you into my brain for a bit. Or is it my heart? I’m not sure… but please, come join me in the place where my obsession lives.

I have been up and down with emotions lately. I think fatigue is partially to blame, since Ellen is still not sleeping well (zzzzzzz… so tired). But I don’t think I can pin all the blame on exhaustion – it seems more likely that my baseline is already emotional, and the fatigue simply heightens the highs and lowers the lows.

The summary is that I’m still really struggling with the idea of being done having babies and being pregnant. My thoughts are consumed. Everything makes me think of it. I shed a few tears every time I hear about a new pregnancy or new baby, every time my own sweet babies do something new or wonderful or amusing or grown up, every time I see a commercial for the olympics and think about how proud their parents must be, and what will my children do with their lives?!

All of the joys of my kids and observing other people’s joys with their own parenthood experiences provide me with simultaneous highs and lows. I feel pretty wrecked from wrestling with it constantly – literally everything seems to make me think of babies.

I wish I could figure out how to stop mourning the passing of the childbearing phase of my life so the highs of parenthood could exist without feeling loss at the same time.

Life feels like nonstop excitement and pride and all-around wonderfulness (if you ignore the lack of sleep). In my eyes, my kids are perfect and I’m so full of love for them. And they’re both doing some pretty amazing things right now! Lewis is potty training and doing so great, and he is having full, grown-up conversations and showing ability to reason with logic and starting – ever so slowly – to process his emotions more maturely, and he is growing like a weed (finally hit 30 lbs on our bathroom scale!). And Ellen is rolling over (sporadically), eating solids, sitting up unsupported, laughing, and also growing like a weed…

It is all so, so good. I just wish I could stop feeling so sad. Knowing Ellen’s “firsts” are my last “firsts” makes me feel desperate to soak all of them up and savor them, but no matter how much I soak and savor, it just doesn’t feel like it is enough.

That sounds awful, to say that what I’m getting from my children isn’t enough. How do I express just how enough my kids are, yet still explain why I need more? Lewis and Ellen are more than a dream come true. Every little bit of them is so satisfying and sweet, and I couldn’t love them more, even when they challenge and exhaust me. But they’re so good – so enough – that they make me want more of their sweet goodness. And the only way I can think of to get more enough is to have more of those chubby miracles to give me more of that good stuff.

Like I said, I can’t stop thinking about it. I’m all over the place, feeling so many things.  It is such a challenging emotional combination – Loss and fullness, painful deliciousness, over-the-top satisfaction and deep-in-your-soul craving.

What a mess!

I keep thinking to myself, “just one more. If not one more baby for our family, then one more pregnancy as a surrogate. Then I’ll be ready to say goodbye to this. Then the craving will end.”

But there is no guarantee, is there? Maybe I’ll never feel done. Maybe I’ll never want to stop. Maybe at some point, I just have to accept that I’m done – listen to my head instead of my heart. Maybe that time is…. now?