The 2nd time around.

It's amazing to me how truly *different* things are this time around. How much less foreign it all seems, how much more collected I am.

It's like what I told my mom the day after Samina was born, as we sat there and I held her and looked into her little face:  the first time around, with Sofia, I felt like I was looking down on the experience from above. I wasn't myself, wasn't for quite a long time. I felt - with such gut wrenching reality - the absoluteness of my new role as Mother, Protector. I felt it so physically that it often hurt to breathe for the first few months. The fear was tangible, and the permanence...the permanence made my head spin and my soul weary. As much as I loved, *loved* my new daughter, I could not get my head around the fact that I had switched positions and, in a single instant, my perspective had been shifted from Daughter to Mother.

This time? Quite the opposite happened. I am just as aware of that permanence, but I am not afraid of it. I am cherishing it. Every second of it (ok, the late night rocking back to sleep still has me crying, every so often). The bonding with Samina was instant - and seeing her with Sofia, my two girls...MY two girls...doesn't make my gut hurt, but makes things clear and bright and sunny in my heart.

I guess all I needed was a little time, a chance to find myself in the tumult and post-hurricane debris. Because, well, here I am, at it again, but with so much more happiness than I thought I would be able to carry.