I had a lot of years to cover, so I started with the most recent shots in our photo library and started working my way backward.
We'd just had a baby a few weeks before and so of course, the overwhelming majority was shots of the baby sleeping or being held by various family members. I scrolled back one week, two weeks, and then suddenly he wasn't in the pictures anymore, because he hadn't been born yet.
Wait, hadn't he always been a part of our family? I couldn't imagine or hardly even remember life without him, and yet he only existed in a few dozen pictures and that was it.
It next occurred to me that someday our photo library will have not just pictures of him swaddled like a burrito in his sister's arms, but pictures of him playing pee-wee soccer, graduating from high school, getting married. It's almost as hard to imagine that as it is imagining life before he existed.
The ladies in the grocery store will tell you it goes by so fast, but I don't think that's quite right. The shocking part isn't how fast time goes by, but that it goes at all.
Motherhood means you give yourself so completely to your people in this present moment it's almost unfathomable that another moment, a completely different one, will ever come.
It's hard to believe it wasn't always so messy and loud around here, and it's just as hard to believe that as time marches on the kids will grow up it and it will get quiet again. I can't quite wrap my head around it.
Motherhood may not speed up time, but it certainly does distort it.
I'm a little unnerved by the motherhood time warp, but also grateful for the way it reminds me that whatever I love (or loathe!) about the current stage isn't forever, no matter how much it seems that way. The best thing to do is enjoy the ride.
5 comments:
Beautifully said. Thank you.
This is a really interesting question, because it does see like it goes so slow sometimes and yet you look back and think, how has it been that long? I feel like I try to be in the moment as much as possible, and that's really the best you can do. Because you can't freeze it, and it's a strange combination of feeling like one day takes forever while the week just flew by.
This made me cry. Not because it was overly emotional, but because today as I was riding four-wheelers with my kids, I was thinking along similar thoughts. All because my daughter was asking about my Mom today, who passed away long before she was born. (Not before she was thought of because we tried for four years to have her and my mom was alive when we started praying for her arrival.) It is definitely an odd feeling to realize how much time, life and people change. I write (or will write on this new blog) about how we need to make the most of every moment we have because I watched my mom die of cancer, and I ended up making one of the hardest decisions of my life with my first born that makes me appreciate every single second I have with my kids even when I'm bouncing off the walls trying to keep my cool.
Exactly, you just do the best you can. When I look back to a decade ago when my oldest was a baby, in some respects it seems like a million years ago. It doesn't really feel like the time flew by - not to me, anyway - it just feels so weird to think that she was a baby once and now she's not anymore! And someday she'll be in her 40s and that's equally weird to imagine.
I've gotten a lot of canned "The days are long, but the years are short" responses to this article, which are missing my point, and I appreciate that you caught what I was trying to say in this post!
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