the days were long and the years were short, the old mother said

I wake from a nap after a week with my grown children and grandson. I awake in sharp panic, confusion that years of constant attention, presence, babies at my sleeping breast in a family bed for years, the books and books and books I read in a growing cast of character voices, countless steamed broccoli florets and chicken and sack lunches of carrots, peanut butter and jelly, apples sliced, sippy cups washed, school work begged and dallied, sleepless fevers and yellow stained cloth diapers and tooth fairy notes in curly script, the realm of naked toddlers, dancing wildly on rocks and cawing like ravens, bed jumping and good night kisses, all of it, all of it, over, memories faded but for videos and photos I fear will never be printed, just lingering as fragile code. I awake in slow motion panic. Did it happen? Where did it all go? My life now spread out before me in service of others’ children, my life expanding and shrinking toward what? Time for myself? What I dreamed when my children were young and now is barely here in the snippets a teacher steals before breakfast and after dinner with her exhausted husband? My bed the only place I’m free. My body’s nerves, the tree of me, a three-dimensional history of lost memories, beg me to dig myself up, replant myself at my children’s feet.