Maeryn.

You are a towering enigma

Pouring out your femininity, your intellect, your pink

Bottled bubbles and purple pony-tail innocence

Into projects spilled onto bedroom floors, kitchen tables, car backseats

Infinite table tops and crumbs in the carpet

I follow behind with vacuum, with folder, with sippy cup, with arms

I enfold you to feel your tears and tiny heart flip flop and beat out rhythms I do not yet understand...

Nor will I ever... not completely.

I pack up hopes in boxes and watch with keen eyes for passions and priorities as they develop...

Tiny droplets and clues and hiccups of things to come.

Your hair waves down your back as you stream through the living room shirtless

And I smile and you reach up

Sometimes I am too busy

And you demand with screaming voice

Or cower because you are sad and I cannot hear you.

You play with plastic dinosaurs in the soft corner in the window-light alone

Contended and warm and chattering and I carry the laundry up and down stairs

And your room is dark and smells like hand-me-down clothes and spilled juice and powder

You have built your own block tower.  High and leaning and staggeringly perfect.

I did not see it this morning, when you spent obvious hours constructing

I asked you and you said, shaking your head, "It kept falling, so I knocked it down," somehow not realizing that it still stood in it's magnificence in the middle of your bedroom.

I touch your cheek.  I cook your lunch over steaming stovetop.  

I feel familiar guilty, washed over feelings

Because I can never be good enough at being your mother

And you touch my face and smile and skip away because 
you don't care if I am perfect.