Missing Scrapbook Pages

I think of all the small moments I used to record--a cute expression, a party at school; blowing bubbles in the spring air, splashing around against the summer heat, crunching through autumn leaves, sledding down winter snows. As events big and small happened I mentally noted what each spread would look like, how I would arrange the pictures to tell the story of our life, waiting for the rare bits of time I had to work the images together, carefully blending photographs and papers and stamps and ink and tape and reflective thoughts and love. I wondered when I'd ever have enough time to finish it all for you, for you required a lot of my life.

Now all I have is time--time to imagine you playing beside your sister, time to create a theme for a non-existent birthday party I might have thrown for you, time to hurt and time to try and block the hurt, time to walk by your portrait hanging on the wall and wonder when the next time will be that I make sure your hair is cut, your clothes are bought and laid out, your picture form is filled out and returned. In the small things and big things alike I mourn the missing scrapbook pages, pages that were torn from me before I knew to hold tighter to the book that was you, not knowing the emptiness that was soon to come.

Being a mother is hard, often deemed the hardest job of all. Still we say it's more than worth it, as we women enlist for the call over and over again. What some of us know is that being a step-mom is harder, yet. Loving a child that is not your own but caring for him as if he is, having all the responsibilities of motherhood but none of the rights, sharing her with another women who in all actuality is sharing her with you--all of these things and more cloud our emotions and entangle our thoughts, yet like motherhood we raise our hands and say it's more than worth it.

Knowing all of these things, I thought I had the world's two hardest jobs--being a mother and a step-mother. How could I know I didn't know what hard was at all? But through the days of those missing scrapbook pages I learned. Not being allowed to be one is the hardest of all.