You feel this too, right?

There must be some evolutionary reason that the fourth trimester is so vivid in my memory. Or maybe it's just that for once I'm completely present, FOMO at its most intense. Where the sunlight spills into the house in the afternoon, which flowers are blooming outside and which ones are dying, the phantom baby kicks inside my deflated belly, the places my body aches and bleeds pointing to the good work of birth-- I remember it all. It's an intoxicating way to live: the mindful fourth trimester.

But last year, my fourth tri landed in the middle of Before and After, as I've journaled about here. Somewhere in between memorizing the curves of Porter's face, the way his eyelids look like a line-drawing of angel's wings when he sleeps, and that searing sting of early breastfeeding, all the other "2020" memories are locked up and tangled in that postpartum haze too. And returning to that same bright winter sun can bring me to my knees if I'm not careful.

My PPD caught up with me around Porter's birthday-- an unlucky combo of PMS, the nagging feeling that my mind and body shouldn't *still* feel this postpartum a year later, and thumbing through pictures of his first seven weeks. Pictures of May holding him in the Groundhog's Day hat she colored at kindergarten, the same bitter cold of February school drop-offs where I fastidiously tucked blankets in his carseat, and signed my kid in tardy too many times. Even the pitch of his portable sound machine reminds me of the days we left the house without triple-checking for masks.

And then swiping through the other ten and a half months of his first year-- all of which happened within our own walls, or in empty parks, with our family of five. This inescapable reality that we are almost back to March 13, and my newborn is a toddler now, and my 6-year-old will dress up for her 100th day of "school" sitting at a desk in her bedroom, never mind the "remote learning" folder she brought home last spring. The left side was labeled "Week 1," the right, "Week 2," as if a pandemic could be neatly tucked into a paper folder. 

I try to tie things up when I write. Doesn't every story need a good denouement? ...Something I've learned, a nod to my Christian heritage, or even a metaphor that helps me move on. But, I guess what I'm trying to say is, I can't be alone, right? You all feel this too? And remember where the afternoon sunlight falls in February?