Mostly I’m just overwhelmed, and nurturing this place has fallen to the bottom of my list of obligations. I keep a pretty active daily photo diary on Instagram, but carving out time for lengthy posts just hasn’t been possible lately.

I’m hoping that this won’t be the case for too much longer, but until then, I hope you’ll bear with me.

For now, here’s a video I took of Vera on Saturday after I busted her secretly cutting her own hair in the bathroom.

Almost the very moment Juliette was born, I realized that my relationship with Veronica had changed. I think I knew it in the days leading up to giving birth for the second time. Each night in those last days of pregnancy, I crawled into Vera’s bed with her and kept my arms around her until she had fallen asleep. My swollen belly was there in bed between us and on those last nights I could quite literally feel the sand draining out on my time in this one-on-one mother and daughter bond. On each of those nights I couldn’t keep the tears from slipping down my face. I couldn’t keep myself from thinking about how it felt to lose my mother so young, and hoped that Veronica would never experience that herself. Nonetheless I could feel loss coming our way.

I am an only child and for the last three years my relationship with Vera has been very much like my relationship with my own mother — incredibly deep and connected and urgent. My mother was my absolute universe. She gave light to my entire world and for much of my life my days unequivocally revolved around her existence. And then they revolved around her death. My relationship with Veronica has easily mimicked that closeness, giving me a much deeper understanding of the bond I shared with my mom. I never imagined that it would really change, until those last days of pregnancy when I suddenly realized that everything was about to change.

We brought Juliette home after just one night in the hospital. We got to the house around 7 that evening and Vera danced around the living room, wild with excitement about her sister’s arrival. The next morning when Vera awoke, I left Juliette and Greg and in our bed and climbed into Vera’s bed with her in an effort to keep things the same as usual. But instead of snuggling into me like she normally did, she opened her eyes, looked right past me and said, “Where’s my sister?”

In that very moment I knew that everything had changed. In that moment I realized that these two girls will probably be closer with each other than they’ll ever be with me.

While that breaks my heart a little, it also mends it in a strange way. My biggest fear as a mom is of more loss. Because I know mother-loss so intimately, I worry all the time about the girls losing me. Them having each other assuages my fears about that in an unexpected way. I can’t even imagine how different the last decade of my life would have been had I had a sibling. So even in the midst of mourning an overly close relationship with Veronica, I feel incredible gratitude for what she has, and will have, with her sister.

We’re four and a half months into this change and, although things have shifted irrevocably between all of us, I can certifiably say that Juliette has only served to enhance our little family. (The fact that I’m more crabby and stressed out than ever before in my life must be acknowledged but does not count in this context.) Veronica is still a momma’s girl and yet her relationship with Juliette has already planted deep, deep roots. Now, whenever Vera is upset, it’s not just me she runs to, but Juliette too. Crying over a scraped ankle the other day she moaned into my shoulder, “I want to snuggle with Jules.”

I feel such an enormous responsibility to these two girls, to them as women, to them as individuals and to them as partners. I know that I am going to have to grow and stretch and face all kinds of things about myself in order to carry out this responsibility in the highest fashion.

Here goes nothing.

I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again. I never anticipated the physical closeness that would come with having a child. Sometimes, at the end of a long day, I find it cloying, but most of the time it’s something that I cherish, all too aware of how brief this part of our lives together will be. “Promise me we’ll always snuggle?” I asked Vera, knowing that it was a promise she could never keep, already imagining her in ten years resisting my hugs, just as I did with my own mother. “I promise,” she said, nuzzling closer.

“I miss my mom,” I said then, not knowing if I meant to say it out loud or not.

“It’s okay, mom,” Vera said. “You’ve got me.”

And she was right.

The few times I voiced missing my mother to Veronica, this has always been her response. I wonder how she knows. I wonder how this little girl of three years old knows that indeed she has made my mother’s death okay in a thousand ways. Whatever gaping, gasping hole my mother’s death left in my heart, Veronica has filled and overfilled and stretched to fill some more. The hole is still there yes, but it’s so full of love and life and realness that you’d almost never be able to tell that it was a hole in the first place.

And in becoming a mother I’ve seemingly resurrected my own mother. I hear her every day in my own voice, and I don’t just mean that I sound like her. I mean that I startle myself, that I sometimes wonder if it isn’t her speaking right through me. That the very essence of my mother, and probably of her mother and her mother’s mother, reach right up through my bones, flood through my blood and skin until they become light and air and sound; my mother’s voice hanging in the air of my living room on a sunny September afternoon in Santa Monica.

And so when I say I miss her, and when my daughter responds that it’s okay, for the first time in fifteen years, it really is.