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I know I won’t fall asleep nearly as easily, but I try anyway. Holding her warm body in my arms, I press my hand against her round stomach, waiting to feel my son squirming around inside.
Sleep takes me as I wait. But I don’t know how long I’m out before I wake to the sound of Daisy moaning. My hand is on her stomach, but instead of feeling the baby kick, I notice how incredibly hard it is.
“Daisy… How are you feeling?”
“My back hurts,” she complains, trying to reposition herself to escape the pain. With my hand on her rock-hard stomach, I wait for it to subside before I start to panic. It could be just another round of those Braxton Hicks contractions. After a few moments, she relaxes again, this time facing me.
Minutes pass by before she moans again—sixminutes, to be exact. A smile stretches across my face as I kiss Daisy on the forehead.
“Baby girl, I think he’s coming.”
She blinks her eyes open. “I think so, too.”
“Are you ready?” I ask in the quiet space between us on the pillow.
“No,” she replies.
With that, I kiss her forehead again and grip her hand tightly in mine. “It’s gonna be okay, Daisy.”
“I know,” she mumbles, her body tensing a little more this time.
After a moment, when I think another contraction has subsided, she looks up at me with that beaming smile as she says, “Okay. Let’s go.”
RULE #46: LIFE IS A MESSY DREAM
Daisy’s Epilogue
Three years later
Julian smiles shyly as Ronan kneels by his side, handing him the remote for the little toy sailboat that dances across the water of the giant fountain in the middle of the park. I laugh at the sight, and when he looks over at where I’m nursing his baby sister on the bench, I give him an excited expression.
“Good job, buddy!” I say with a smile.
Amelia is snoozing in my arms as I carefully pull her off my breast and lay her against my shoulder to burp her. She’s almost one and still nursing like crazy. By this age, Julian was already on the move, ready to explore everything he could get his hands on with no time for nursing. But my sweet girl likes to take her time. She’s perfectly content cuddling with her mama.
While the baby naps and the boys play, I relax on the bench, jotting down lyrics in the notepad app on my phone. It’s funny to see how differently my songs turn out now, since becoming a mother. The way I see life compared to how I saw it before. Not better or worse—just different.
For one, I understand on an entirely new level why my mother made the decision she did. How choosing me over Ronan was never a sacrifice, but a choice that ended in love either way.
I’ve also learned to embrace the mess like I couldn’t before. I dreamt of a life that looked more like a vision board or a magazine spread instead of reality. There are days when I struggle to find anything poetic—when the kids are screaming or the house is a mess or my music just won’t come. Nights when I feel like the least sexiest person on the planet, sure that my husband will never want to touch me again. Moments when I feel like a failure.
Those moments are perfectly balanced with the ones that feel like a fantasy—when I can watch the man I love cuddling our daughter or laughing with our son. When the lyrics flow or when he pulls me into his arms at night, spoiling me with pleasure and love like it’s the first time.
Without the mess, those beautiful moments would feel flat and meaningless. So I’ve learned to embrace it all.
I hear Julian’s cry across the park and I look up to see him lying flat on the ground, his little glasses slipped off his nose, and his tear-soaked face contorted in pain. He must have tripped on his way over to me, but Ronan is there in a heartbeat, pulling him up to his feet and brushing off his scraped knees.
My heart swells in my chest as I watch him pick up our son, running a soothing hand over his back as he kisses the side of his head. Julian clings to his neck as he cries.
“Is he okay?” I ask when the two of them reach the bench where I’m sitting.
“Yeah. He’s okay,” Ronan replies, but Julian shows no signs of letting go of his daddy.
“We should head back to the house for lunch,” I say as I carefully maneuver Amelia into her stroller. She stays asleep when I lay her down. Standing up, I notice Ronan’s eyes drifting down to my chest.
“You might want to put that away,” he says with a smile, and I glance down to find my breast still hanging out the top of my blouse.
“Oops,” I reply as I tuck it away and fix my shirt. It hardly fazes me anymore. I guess it’s a good thing we’re in Paris, where no one bats an eye at a nursing mother’s breasts.
