Is this piecing?

[Freckle6]

When H heard about Elizabeth last summer, it freaked him out because that was his grandmother's name. But last spring my friend had a baby and her middle name is Elizabeth so I'm sure that's where my invisible daughter's name came from. LOL.

My brother is 9 years younger than I so I was a semi only child. I went away to college when he was 9 and then H and I moved 900 mile away when my brother was 12 and didn't come back until he was almost 18 so it's weird. We're close, but I feel more like a mother to him than anything. H was a "surprise" baby and his brother and sister are 7 and 9 years older than him so he was sort of an only too I guess.

How did you cope all those years having had a H that left so early in your baby's life?

Honestly, it's very much a blur until my S was about 3. Even before he left, he had very little interaction with S. Which was unlike how I expected him to be. From the time we were in 8th grade he talked about having a son. It got more and more urgent over the years because his only brother had only 3 girls. I never got the big deal because our/his last name is only slightly less common than Smith or Jones. At one point after the bomb he told me he was hardly home "because I don't want to get too attached to him".

Having an infant was probably a blessing in some ways. I couldn't curl up and wait to die. Baby needed to be fed and have diapers changed and all that. My MIL was invaluable and would take him for a couple hours every few days so I could be lazy and do things like mow the lawn, shovel, etc.

It's gotten easier as he's gotten older, but it's still hard to do it on your own, as you know. When H and I took S to the Bronx zoo this past summer it was the first time I've ever taken S somewhere where I wasn't the sole person responsible for him and it felt very strange.