In the Moment

I sit here today, well, for the past few months, actually, almost sobbing at the reality of life - that it moves on, no matter how hard you try to hold on, it keeps going, going, going. Time is relentless and you can either fight it or live IN it, you can't do both. Every day I try to live it, to live in the proverbial moment, but I fail...since at the end of the day, every day, I anguish over the loss of that day, that I will never get it back - and it chokes me up, makes me angry - makes me shake my fist at God that my babies will be gone someday. I try to hold them close to my chest, to keep them at this age, to keep them here with me...selfish, I know, but it's a feeling like no other, the terrifying loss of time, of this time with them - almost like the grasping and containing of falling sand, and the frustration in the unfruitful task is unbearable.

Yes, it's obvious, I am an emotional wreck! Most sane mothers are happy that their kids will have their own lives someday - that they will be successful, happy and free to make their own choices - and that you will be ecstatic to see how they have grown into themselves and matured and all of that. While the thought does make me happy, I don't ever want to see them leave this little nest of ours! What we have made for them and how intense we have felt for them, those feelings of this unique family unit are things we never want to lose. The morning serenades, the random hugs, the adorable giggles - how can you say goodbye to these things?

Every day I trudge through the necessities of our routine life, the life that I have said many times before reminds me of Groundhog Day, over and over, the same things repeated in an endless loop...and I try to "better my score"... meaning, get it all done quicker than I did yesterday. There is nothing worse than putting the kids to bed, realizing you are exhausted yourself and then walking downstairs to remind yourself of the mountain of work left for you in the kitchen, the dining room, on the deck and in the living room. So, lately I have been trying to finish most of it before the kiddos head up to bed, frantically washing dishes and receiving leg hugs here and there from Braden and bouncing back the "Hi Mommy!"s I hear enter the kitchen and them running back out to play without me...all in the name of "getting it done".

But I tell ya....It's a toss up. Yes, I feel good and more relaxed when I come down to a cleaner house, but also....in "getting it done", I am missing the "doing" part of life (see below).... I am trading the sweet, precious, fleeting time I could spend with the kids in the evening just to clean up, a perfect example of something that means nothing really, in the scheme of things. There will always be dishes, even after they go their own separate ways...but there is only "now", right now.

I think the fact that we have three at the same age is what is causing these epidemic sobbing fits. The realization that as intense as the first few years are, their childhood will be the same! Fleeting and ....Intense. We only have one chance to spend their childhood with them ALL. They will leave together, not spaced out as to buffer us from the reality of time marching on. They travel to college or out and about... together! Like 1 child would, only we have to let three spread their wings simultaneously. How hard is that gonna be?

And I know it seems far away from now that we will have to endure that challenge, but I am sure if I blink, that moment will arrive...so I almost religiously have to remind myself that we are here, we are now - it is so hard to do, I know! But, it is all we have and it is all we get, so honestly, who cares if you are tired and face a TON of work into the wee hours of the morning? When it's all said and done...those memories, those times we are fully with them are all we will have left - so, make it of fun and of sweet things and of love, with them...and not of dishes.

If you are wondering, this article is what prompted this blog post - I have been feeling this emotional deluge for months and months now...but this article is just beautiful and says it all....and yes, I sobbed during my reading of it - I dare you not to do the same. :)

From Anna Quindlen, Newsweek Columnist and Author

"All my babies are gone now. I say this not in sorrow but in disbelief. I take great satisfaction in what I have today: three almost-adults, two taller than I am, one closing in fast. Three people who read the same books I do and have learned not to be afraid of disagreeing with me in their opinion of them, who sometimes tell vulgar jokes that make me laugh until I choke and cry, who need razor blades and shower gel and privacy, who want to keep their doors closed more than I like. Who, miraculously, go to the bathroom, zip up their jackets and move food from plate to mouth all by themselves. Like the trick soap I bought for the bathroom with a rubber ducky at its center, the baby is buried deep within each, barely discernible except through the unreliable haze of the past. Everything in all the books I once pored over is finished for me now. Penelope Leach., T. Berry Brazelton, Dr. Spock. The ones on sibling rivalry and sleeping through the night and early-childhood education have all grown obsolete. Along with Goodnight Moon and Where the Wild Things Are, they are battered, spotted, well used. But I suspect that if you flipped the pages dust would rise like memories. What those books taught me, finally, and what the women on the playground taught me, and the well-meaning relations –what they taught me, was that they couldn't really teach me very much at all.

Raising children is presented at first as a true-false test, then becomes multiple choice, until finally, far along, you realize that it is an endless essay. No one knows anything. One child responds well to positive reinforcement, another can be managed only with a stern voice and a timeout. One child is toilet trained at 3, his sibling at 2. When my first child was born, parents were told to put baby to bed on his belly so that he would not choke on his own spit-up. By the time my last arrived, babies were put down on their backs because of research on sudden infant death syndrome. To a new parent this ever-shifting certainty is terrifying, and then soothing. Eventually you must learn to trust yourself. Eventually the research will follow. I remember 15 years ago poring over one of Dr. Brazelton's wonderful books on child development, in which he describes three different sorts of infants: average, quiet, and active. I was looking for a sub-quiet codicil for an 18-month old who did not walk. Was there something wrong with his fat little legs? Was there something wrong with his tiny little mind? Was he developmentally delayed, physically challenged? Was I insane? Last year he went to China . Next year he goes to college. He can talk just fine. He can walk, too.

Every part of raising children is humbling, too. Believe me, mistakes were made. They have all been enshrined in the, "Remember-When- Mom-Did Hall of Fame." The outbursts, the temper tantrums, the bad language, mine, not theirs. The times the baby fell off the bed. The times I arrived late for preschool pickup. The nightmare sleepover. The horrible summer camp. The day when the youngest came barreling out of the classroom with a 98 on her geography test, and I responded, "What did you get wrong?". (She insisted I include that.) The time I ordered food at the McDonald's drive-through speaker and then drove away without picking it up from the window. (They all insisted I include that.) I did not allow them to watch the Simpsons for the first two seasons. What was I thinking?

But the biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make while doing this. I did not live in the moment enough. This is particularly clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs. There is one picture of the three of them, sitting in the grass on a quilt in the shadow of the swing set on a summer day, ages 6, 4 and 1. And I wish I could remember what we ate, and what we talked about, and how they sounded, and how they looked when they slept that night.

I wish I had not been in such a hurry to get on to the next thing: dinner, bath, book, bed. I wish I had treasured the doing a little more and the getting it done a little less.

Even today I'm not sure what worked and what didn't, what was me and what was simply life. When they were very small, I suppose I thought someday they would become who they were because of what I'd done. Now I suspect they simply grew into their true selves because they demanded in a thousand ways that I back off and let them be. The books said to be relaxed and I was often tense, matter-of-fact and I was sometimes over the top. And look how it all turned out. I wound up with the three people I like best in the world, who have done more than anyone to excavate my essential humanity.

That's what the books never told me. I was bound and determined to learn from the experts. It just took me a while to figure out who the experts were."

All I can say is the obvious..... Enjoy every. single. minute. and relish the trade off of hard work after they go to bed as extra time you got to spend with them. Squeeze it all, for this is our one and only shot to enjoy the good stuff.