Together

I tell them when they were inside my stomach they played with each others toes, wiggled the ear closest to them and decided on the best time to meet us.

An “expert” once explained they could not sense the loss of their sister. Memory doesn’t form until much later in infancy.

But I am their mom.
I know.
I have watched them since the moment I was able to lift them out of incubators and place them together in my arms,

how naturally they folded to one another,
how one’s cry never startled the other,
how they scooted, then crawled, then toddled close again, if one ventured too far.
And I watch them now.
The invisible pull they have whether they are fighting over a toy we have five more of, or balancing shoulder to shoulder at the couch’s edge. There is no such thing as space between them.
They make up the distance before I realize it is there.
For this reason I worried over separating them for the first time this past year as I sent one off to preschool and nurtured the special needs of the other. I look back now at my worries and know I could not have been more wrong.

As we hurried around yesterday morning, one spinning his cereal bowl before school, the other insisting on sandals for her doctor’s appointment, I heard my daughter explain her brother:
When I am gone I won’t be able to feel you home, Parker. You will be at school.
And just as I was about to interject, attempt to translate what she may have been saying, my son sprinted from the room and returned to remind me their words to each other need no translation.
He handed his sister a heart swirled with color.

Touch the blue part Kenna, and you will feel me home.
Through tears I tucked the rainbow-ed heart into my daughter’s bag and marveled at the gift they are to each other.
There is a space in that heart for their sister too.
They have felt her Home all along.

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Jessica Watson is a freelance writer, blogging her way through the loss of her daughter, autism, life with multiples and everything else in between. You can find her at Four Plus an Angel, on twitter, facebook and always, always on Pinterest.