There are nights when I hold her close, her heartbeat against mine, the intimacy of our bond so deep, the tenderness so palpable that all I can think of is this. This moment. This soul. This love.

This, I whisper to myself, is the meaning of life. Also—and this part I don’t whisper, I just know—this mommy is really high.

I’m not sure when I became a pothead. In fact, I’m not quite sure what the definition is. For me, it’s a few hits of the bowl, a few nights a week. It’s my release from daily drudgery, my descent to Zen. It’s my time. Except it isn’t.

There’s something about marijuana that makes me want to lie in the grass and find dragons in the clouds. Or linger in the kitchen, admiring my husband refill the dog bowl. Or curl in bed, reading every story of my daughter’s princess adventure book, nuzzling my nose deep in her mop of curls until she falls asleep.  

Our evenings start the same. Mr. D and I return to our second job of tantrums and cuddles, boo-boos and kisses. It’s an endless, delirious kind of joy, but we’re already exhausted, defeated and drained from the 9-5. Using our stoner code, he asks if I’d like a “banana,” and we smoke the bowl in shifts, almost always before dinner.

The meal is delicious. The conversation sublime. We joke that the two-year-old must be a reincarnated ninja assassin whose only retained skill is gouging the eyes of her enemies, which she deftly employs at 3 am while sleeping horizontally between us. We marvel at the five-year-old’s self-portrait—a stick figure with wild, unruly hair like her mother’s, a pensive smile, and a thought bubble that leads up to the single word on her mind: “mom.”

My heart bursts.

We revel in the love and laughter of these tiny humans who share our genes. And when the little humans eventually fall asleep, often nestled in our arms, the night is still ours.

We smoke again.  We kiss like teenagers. We laugh at my pajamas.

“Edgar,” he says, donning a fake British accent as he calls for our imaginary butler. “I want to feel sexy tonight! Fetch me my silk shorts. Yes, yes, the ones with the sock monkeys.”

He takes off my monkey shorts and kisses me some more.

Afterwards, we lounge in bed, the silence as warm as the blanket around us. “I just want to stay right here,” Corinne Bailey Rae croons from the iPhone speaker. “Until never dawns.”

Am I still stoned? Maybe a little, though sex is almost always more potent than THC, the transition back to sobriety like a smooth roller coaster that hasn’t quite come to a full stop. It’s a blissful uncertainty, and I can never tell if I’m high off of life, or pot, or a perfect combination of the two.

Life isn’t always this good. For the most part, it’s typical. Looming deadlines at work, spats over the credit card bill, catastrophic wars over who gets the hot-pink crayon when dozens of the exact color lay unused in the box. It’s those little exertions that compound over time, that have the power to grip me to my core like a vise that grows ever tighter.

But things help. A run in the autumn breeze calms my mind. A glass of wine numbs the stress. And a toke of weed shoves it all to its rightful insignificant place. Marijuana affords a certain clarity that brings with it immense appreciation and gratitude.

A few weeks back, the little one was in her bed, alone, our second consecutive night of attempting to wean her from the cuddle-you-until-you-fall-asleep routine that seemed to be draining us of our final morsels of energy. Her big sister snored softly from the bed beside her, but from outside the door, I could hear faint whimpers that grew louder with each sad breath.

When I finally entered her room, she held me and said, “I was crying mommy, but then I stopped. But then I started crying again.” She took a long pause, so long I thought she might have fallen asleep, and said: “I very, very love my dad.”

I relayed the message to Mr. D, who curled up beside her. As she wrapped her little arms around him, she whispered, in the midst of a contented sigh, “It’s good to be back with my favorite daddy.”

It transported my husband back in time, to the hospice ward of the oncology center, watching the slow rise and fall of his father’s chest, wondering how many more breaths there would be. His father was so sick, the cancer so aggressive, that it hurt to speak. But with the same rueful sigh, he looked up at his son and said, “It’s nice to wake up… and see you here.”

In a lifetime of things that never were, and will never be, we have the moments that are.

And it is there that I want to live. In the mundane. In the infinitely infinitesimal. In the seeming insignificance of every precious moment of the day, basking in the permanence of love.

The higher I get, the more I find myself there. And while pot isn’t a prerequisite to reach this plane, it helps.

There was a time when I felt differently.

“We can’t do this forever,” I would say in the early years of our relationship, emerging from a cloud of bong smoke with hazy ideals of what the future would hold.

We’d go through a stoner phase, I assumed, and eventually transition to alcohol as our sole vice. “Like normals,” I’d joke. But life, with all of its messes and irritations and banalities, kept getting in the way.

Where that extra glass of wine amplified my aggravation at another hellish bedtime routine, a puff from the banana made me want the evening to last forever.

I had no better place to be than snugggled in a Dora the Explorer bed, illuminated by the soft, pink flower light, singing “Hey Jude” to my bad sleeper, until her leg, always pretzeled across my body, twitched with the first stages of sleep.

Weeknight dinners didn’t feel like chores when I had my husband’s company in the kitchen, serenading me with Lil Wayne and making the accompanying gravy for Thai chicken cucumber boats.

And I saw my life, bogged down with all of its routines and monotonies, in full splendor.

Shortly after my first was born, I asked a family friend, whose own girls were long past the ages of diapers and bottles and onesies, if the days would always feel so long, if the monotony would ever end.

“The days go slow,” she agreed. “But the years go fast.”

I felt the weight of this wisdom this fall, standing at the bus stop, waving goodbye to my new kindergartner as the tears streamed down my face.

How did we get here, already, I wondered, and how fast will the journey be?

Brushing the curls off her face that night, deep in my stoner reveries, the soft weight of her leg draped over my own, it didn’t matter. In the bed beside her were my two other loves, the little one fast asleep, her small arms entwined with her father’s.

The meaning of life was before me, as it always is. In the mundane. In the infinitely infinitesimal. In the permanence of love.