Jen is right. It is the experiences of childhood that tell the tale of our youth as we get older and gain perspective about our upbringing. It is not only the opportunities that we are offered–soccer camps, slumber parties and piano lessons–or the material gifts that shower down upon us on Christmas and birthdays, but the experiences we share directly with our parents. The small stuff as much as the big. The time that is devoted to us individually. A one-on-one experience. An experience that is engineered to delight both child and parent. A moment to be shared, to be treasured, to be remembered this time next year, and the year after that, and the year after that… A trip to Yankee Stadium, a hike up an unknown trail, a night spent sleeping beside the twinkling Christmas tree on a cold December night.
I haven’t been able to get that thought about the tree out of my head. The Christmas tree is magic in my home. Magic. I think I will make a nest on the floor tomorrow night and let my oldest stay up late with me. We will snuggle up and watch a movie. Or we will play a few games of Yahtzee. Or we will crack open our books, flop down on our bellies and read side by side. I will make popcorn. I will give him my undivided attention. It will be a special night for both of us. We will sleep side-by-side. And even if nothing spectacular happens or is said this night, it will breathe magic.
I wish I could do this more often. I wish I had the energy. The patience. The time.
Time. I suppose it’s not an excuse. But it lays down that way in my mind. “I don’t have the time. I need more time.”
I push against it. And then I pull back. I wrap my fingers around it and squeeze every last drop from time, trying my best to create the moments, recognize the moments, live through and remember the moments that are creating the memories in my life and in the lives of my children and of this family. This family full of grace and light and hope.
But there are days. Shaded days. Where all I am doing is just trying to get by. Focusing on the next step. Dressing the children. Getting breakfast, lunch or dinner on the table. Bathing. Reading. Remembering the ever-lengthening to-do list.
When days are like this I fixate on how I can have more time in my life to do the things that must be done as well as do the things I want to do. It is not a new problem. We all need more time. We all need more patience. With ourselves. With our children. With our lives and the constraints in which we must live. Time and money. Money and time.
I don’t need suggestions. I know life is lived in waves. We struggle to be ever-present and then we learn to let go. We look for distraction from the daily chores and duties and then we learn to find peace in them, knowing we are providing for our families. Washing the dishes can be tedious and obnoxious at noon, and yet a zen-like experience before bedtime. Every little thing is dependent upon every other little thing. Every little thing has an opposite. Every little thing is balanced without any help from us. And it is not so much a balance that I wish to strike. The balance is there. All on it’s own.
What I wish for is to live a life of mothering without the regrets of time that I have now. I work too much. I am away too often. I rush my children and myself toward the next step. And I am exhausted by it.
I have a beautiful family and I want to spend more nights sleeping beside the Christmas tree. I don’t want to look back and wish my days were lived differently. Wish I created more moments. Recognized, out loud, more moments.
Tomorrow night I will sleep in the den of our cozy home beside my son. I will smile with his smile. I will delight in his delight. I know that my body will yearn for my bed, but I will push the thoughts aside and breathe in the moment between us. And I hope that we both will remember it in ten years, but even if we don’t, it will have been. And that is just enough for me.
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today, i am not feeling well. it is some kind of “yucky tummy” issue (that is a real medical diagnosis according to Dr. Hurricane)(and NO!!! it is NOT because of a new tenant in my uterus!!). i desperately, desperately needed to sleep this afternoon. my two little ones went down for a nap, and i made my hurricane come and lay down with me. he is a natural-born snuggler (when he feels like bestowing that gift) and is also a human heater. i was warm. i was comforted. i smelled the dirty-dog and damp boots smell of my 4 year old son. i did not fall asleep right away; i just lay there and sniffed. and we had a little talk, about bakugan. or pokemon? i don’t remember. when i finally fell asleep, i slept like the dead (? creepy).. like a baby (? yeah right!).. like i was on my very own Tempur-pedic with down comforters and fluffy pillows (! yup, that’s the one).
it was lovely.
and i did not stop to truly appreciate the time that he and i lay together until now. so, thank you.
(and i am not dead, or even undead – although i hear that’s all the rage these days. being undead, i mean. i have been busy Going Mentally Insane what with the numerous savages that have been running around my madhouse this week. and then, of course, “Yucky Tummy” last night and today.)
I think we all know we appreciate too little. Recognize too few moments when we are actually IN the moment. I have learned how to be easier on myself for this. And as much trouble as it is to create the moments–figure out the scheduling–I find that my life requires that right now. Sure we still have impromptu dance parties in the living room at 8:00 on a Tuesday night and we still pull over at an ice cream stand just because, but I have to believe that I have a hand in making those moments of magic that will live in my heart always.
and that comment really was all about me, wasn’t it?
i wanted to say (before i got distracted and wrapped up in talking about myself.. hey.. shiny objects!!) that i LOVE the idea of laying down with my children (when they are older) in front of the christmas tree and eating popcorn and talking. or reading. or whatever-ing.
i love this: creating moments. i want to do this too. i want to think of these things on the fly, instead of sitting down at the end of the day and saying, “boy, if only i had thought of this earlier..”
and the never-ending chores. my friends with older children tell me that as they get older, they can be forced, cajoled, bribed, and threatened into contributing more to the household upkeep, thus allowing for more Fun Stuff and Moments. i am looking forward to this. maybe not so much the constant herd-riding to get chores done, but definitely the Fun Stuff.
My seven year old is able to take on more and more responsibility. And though this does not mean he’ll clean up his room without a whole lot of cajoling from me, the point is he’ll do it. He is able. And I know someday all the dirty laundry won’t be solely my responsibility. Or the sweeping. Or the dishes.
I look forward to this time but I also shy away from it. It means my children will get older. That I will have to pull them toward me for a hug. That I will have to remind them it is still okay to be silly with their mum.
I am so often torn between now and then. Knowing that life will pass far too quickly. For the very first time in my life this thought scares the heck out of me. What will I do when the days of little boys are over? I will be a different mom. To very different boys. And it will be fine. It will bring new joys. A new landscape. But still…it scares me.
You paint two such vivid pictures in your writings – the harried mother and the peace and quiet of sleeping by the Christmas tree. Thanks!!!!
And so it goes. The push and pull of life. Pushing one thing away to be pulled toward another. And vice versa.
I am harried. But trying to find peace in between the responsibilities. I am so very grateful for my life. It is a nice life. It is sweet. I can feel its quiet happiness when I stop and listen to my heart.
The Tree Experience is going to be wonderful. Our cat is a menace around a Christmas tree, so we only have a small jobber on our table top; I guess I need to find something else, huh?
But your heart is so in the right place and you and Jen are right–I need to take time with each of my girls individually. Because you know what? They have to share everything, and that sometimes (probably a lot) is suckage. Everyone deserves a little special attention.
Thanks for this. Sometimes I need a pep-talk and a wake-up call. And you girls are way cooler and cuter and funnier than Dr. Phil.
Phew! I thought maybe possibly you were going to say I should consult Dr. Phil before going on a tirade about creating these special moments for our kids. Glad to know I am cooler than he. You DO know he’s backed by Oprah, right?
Jen reminded me. I reminded you. Hopefully all of our kids will benefit. And for fuck’s sake, lock the cat up out back for the month of December. Christmas trees breathe a special kind of magic this time of year! :)
When my oldest was five I woke him up, bundled him in blankets and took him outside on a warm June evening to watch the stars. He still talks about it.
My biggest fear is that my boys will grow up and I will look back on their childhood with huge longing and wonder why I didn’t take them on more walks in the snow through the trees. Why I didn’t take them out more to explore the creeks and ponds of our neighborhood and search for frogs. Why I only read to them at night. Why I didn’t serve ice cream for breakfast, oh yeah, my mother does that for me. There is so much that I do with them but there is always more, perhaps I should add that to my forever growing New Years resolution list.
This Christmas holiday I have 25 days to devote myself to my children and I am looking forward to it. They are the perfect ages to explore enmasse the treasures that our expansive back yard offers us.
Thanks for inspiring me!
25 days. Wow! I dream of that. Time. With my kids. For myself. Time with few expectations. Time just to be. Together. In it. Life. This great big thing. This great big daunting thing.
You know I alternate looking at my children and thinking you have a great life and thinking I don’t give you hardly enough experiences. It is frustrating to waffle so much between knowing that you are doing the best that you can and knowing that you could always do more.
I forgive myself. But I also expect more from myself. Always. How can this be? How can I exist like this? Why am I quicker to listen to my mind than my heart?
Big big questions on a Friday morning. I’m so glad that you came by, Jillian. There is a kinship, for me, with mothers of three sons. It is a different kind of world I know. There are adventures untouched that these children deserve.
You are tapping into something very universal here. The desire to enjoy the time that flits by, to create memories and magic when we are often exhausted and just trying to get by. I think this is endemic to parenthood and likely to life. I constantly find myself saying that I wish there were more hours in the day, that I had more time for the creatures and things that I love. But maybe, just maybe, it is *because* time is limited and furiously passing, these moments we do make, these Christmas tree slumber parties mean even more?
Wonderful post. Thank you for putting into words (compelling ones) things that so many of us, all of us, feel.
Yes. Time. If it were unlimited would we even ponder the concept of living in the moment? But oh how I ache for just a little more of it? Or the ability to spend it differently. I dream of days we all roll out of bed and hang out in our pajamas. We stroll to the park. We ride bikes down a mountain.
It’s not as if we don’t have these days in our life now. We do. We are fortunate to have many, if not enough. But I guess my vision is of days like these where I am not thinking, planning, plotting when the laundry list of life will be completed. Which things I can ignore and postpone to do the things I really want to do.
I’m not happy about being a grown-up. I very often think this. I want to share the world of my children and inhabit their carelessness. If even for a day. And the moments I can do this are most certainly too FEW and FAR BETWEEN!
This was beautiful. Enjoy those moments. They are indeed special. The work has to get done, but we can let more “work” slide to savor the little things. Not all the time, but enough of the time to snapshot simple moments in our mind-film. They stay with us, and hopefully, with our children.
“snapshot simple moments in our mind-film”
beautiful. just beautiful.
My kids will be home all day next week and I’ve lined up the projects: foam door hangers, holiday candy, gingerbread trees to match our houses, caroling, visits with family.
I’ll enjoy it all. They’ll enjoy it all. But there will be an element of rush and stuff to fit all the bonding into seven days. So my new resolve is to find slow, quiet moments stuffed with nothing to just enjoy each other. To let the moments unravel freely and in a way that allows my children to explore themselves and me.
Thanks for reminding us all what’s truly important.
Beautiful. Enjoy that sleep :)
I am often reflecting that I need more time. I know I shoot myself in the foot by blogging when I should be doing other things (ahem, dishes?), yet that is my therapy. The push and pull of life brings us pain and joy. I guess that’s life in the fast lane.
Sleeping with babes is important. So important. Often, the joys of motherhood are lost in the wild fray of life.
Sometimes I will have a conversation with my sister, who’s ten years older than me, about our Christmases (and childhood in general) growing up. She has a much clearer, more cynical memory of how things played out than I do. While I remember many long walks in the woods picking blueberries with my mother, she insists it couldn’t have happened more than two or three times–at most. While I remember magical Christmases full of baking and ornament-making and outings to cut down our own tree, she remembers only one cut-down tree, a sad, scraggly Charlie Brown tree, and says most Christmases during my childhood were cobbled-together affairs made up of the small amount of energy, time, and money our Mom had left after running a daycare out of her home all day and parenting alone at night. Like all of us she was short on time and probably felt huge guilt over not always making it to my school parties and not being able to take me out for an impromptu walk around the neighborhood in the middle of the day–what with the six little children she cared for in our house in order to pay the bills.
Maybe my memories of endless childhood magic aren’t exactly accurate…but still…that is the way I remember it, and that’s OK by me. Obviously, whatever small amount of time and energy and magic Mom was able to squeeze out of the season left a much bigger impression on me than the times she didn’t or couldn’t. Sometimes when I’m feeling pulled in all directions and wonder if it’s even worth bothering to suit the kids up to head out for a winter romp in the yard (after all, I only have a half hour to spare) I remember how some of the smallest things I did with my mom live largest in my memory.
Beautifully written, beautiful message. I agree with Aidan, you have tapped into one of motherhood’s universals.
I also take heart by what Meagan alluded to above. I grew up in a family with 5 daughters, and I have memories different from my sisters, and vastly different from the reality my mother remembers.
I’m glad you started this conversation. It’s one we all pick up over and over (and then set down because we’re too busy to keep it going, right?).
Enjoy your mama-son slumber party. You’ve inspired me, by the way.
These are the moments I live for. These are the moments I remember from when I was our kids age. You write about it so perfectly. You capture exactly why being a mom is worth it. For these moments. For the magic. I hope your slumber party was just as you imagined (and described) it.
xx
Catching up on some blog reading while working night shifts. As I prepared to leave the house for work tonight two of my children objected in different moments to my leaving. I felt guilt and sadness for the moments I miss with my children and also a little but of pride that my job allows us some luxury, flexibility and quality moments that we might not otherwise have. Such a tough balance. Your post made me excited for a little bit of that individual magic too. It will keep me thinking about ways to find those moments with my children. Thanks!
Yes. It comes in waves. The struggle, the letting go. Perfect. And somewhere in there the memories are made. The happiness. The peace.
That is sweet. Tonight’s our night to let the kids sleep by the tree. We kept pushing it back because we “had something” every night of every weekend. But there’s no school tomorrow, and it’s time to enjoy the tree!
“I will delight in his delight”
That, right there. That’s what keeps us going.
That and the hope that one day these little monsters will be picking out our nursing home.