Baby steps

 When you are little you learn everything in rapid succession. Though they call it baby steps, it is quick, it is deliberate. There are stumbling blocks, there are failures but all through the process of learning. But what happens on the other side of life. When your life is ending and you stumble. It seems an odd choice to call it baby steps, or rather to take baby steps when you are no longer infantile. But do we call it that because we return to an infantile state? Where the care and consideration for a declining person are more akin to a baby. In that respect do we return to a state of love that is felt when we hold a baby when we are about to lose someone?

It feels like there are so many questions that get left unanswered with a simple turn of phrase. But in that phrase, I see the frailty and the delicateness of the situation. My mother is taking baby steps away. She is baby steps towards the end and all I can do is watch like a new parent. In awe and utter sadness that she is walking away, but not walking, stumbling, and falling away. There are moments where I see her, the new her and it is shocking, saddening but at the same time full of love and strength. 

She has shown great resilience through all of this and after all of that, she is needing that rest, to be done with it. She has said so herself, I can't do this anymore and I don't blame her. Having your body fail you and your mind slip at such a young age is terrifying and brutal. The reversion to childlike ability is daunting and frustrating for someone who is so staunchly, at her core, independent. 

It is a funny phrase. Baby steps. but in that phrase you see progression, it's just an interesting take to have that progression go a different way than I am sure was intended. 


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