Imbalance.

I still get lots of people asking me if Isla is my first child. It's part of the standard battery of very innocent questions: How old is she? What's her name? How's she sleeping? Is she your first? The experience of raising her is so different from anything I got to experience with Mila that it's not as hard anymore to say "Yes" just to get along with my day, but I still always add the mental qualification: Yes, my first living child. Which is what they mean after all, even if they don't know it, isn't it?

It makes me so sad that we have so little of Mila to remember, especially in light of the incredible new memories we are making with Isla every day. I want to love them equally, but it is impossible to love them in the same way. One I know better and better every day, and one I can never fully know. In one hand I have a mountain; in the other, a grain of sand -- and every day, the disparity grows larger. One doesn't subsume the other, does it? My brain says no, but still I am afraid. I guard the space around my little grain jealously.