Enough is enough

If I knew I could hit a baby to make it stop crying in the middle of the night like I hit the snooze button on my alarm, chances are good I probably would.  That’s the kind of mom I am, though I hate to admit it, between the hours of 12 am and 6 am.  God protects babies from people like me by not installing snooze buttons on the newborn models.

And a long-suffering God graces undeserving people like me with 4 am wake up calls that go like this:

I squint at my phone to determine the time.  3:49 am.  A baby is hungry.

But hungry for more than just milk.

She drinks in my face which is hovering above her bathed in icy light from the phone screen.  A smile of pure joy cracks open the planes of her face and she squawks and chortles at me as if to say, “Hey!  You’re awake now too?!  Awesome!”  She converses for me awhile in this language of coos and squeaks and grins, and while I can’t speak the language fluently, I catch enough to get the idea: “You are my everything.”

For these minutes that wake steals from sleep, I am everything this baby needs to be delighted.  To be filled.

I think of my list of “enough” and know it would have to include a larger version of my bank account, oodles of dates stuffing the month’s calendar, and bonus spins of the clock hand each day.   Then, in the quiet, coo-filled night, I am suddenly deeply, immensely grateful for this wake up call.

I can redefine enough.

I can redefine it to the size of life that can be illuminated in the sphere of a phone’s glow.

The baby empties me to fill herself.  She gets enough.  She goes back to sleep.

And then…

…Because this is real life, the nitty-gritty not perfect life that’s all mine...

She wakes up and throws up.

….Because sometimes, even for babies, enough is enough.

Find more thoughts on Enough over at Lisa Jo Baker’s Five Minute Friday.  In whatever 5 minutes we writers can steal in our day, we jot down our unedited thought’s on the prompt and share.