Savoring the Sweetness of Vanishing Moments

I was chatting in the park the other day with a new acquaintance; this sweet, dear woman was telling me how difficult she was finding the whole 'motherhood' thing and I was nodding sympathetically. She expressed an intense longing for the time when her kids were a little older and it was a little easier.
I don't know what it is with me the past couple weeks, but I've started feeling just the teensiet bit sad whenever I hear someone, or even myself, say "I can't wait until______(fill in the blank examples: my kids are feeding themselves/putting their shoes on/staying dry at night/sleeping through the night/doing their own laundry/wiping their own noses etc.) This is a pretty big shift for me because I spent the first three years of C+J's life talking about how I couldn't wait for them to do xyz that I thought would make my life more comfortable).
Lately I'm truly realizing that each stage has its own set of treasures and they go by in a blink- when the babies aren't sleeping through the night they're preciously soft and spectacularly cuddly and yummy and tiny and new, and when they aren't potty-trained they're learning to really communicate and they think every tiny mundane thing about the world we live in is a stupendous miracle, and when they're still wetting the bed they have the most vivid imaginations and the whole world is alive with magic and secrets and screaming with glee. I took the kids to the pharmacy today and while waiting for quite awhile (seriously we were there for 45 minutes even though it was a call-in) we had a blast playing monster behind a $4 MedicationSpecial display. I looked a little crazy play-grabbing at them, (what else is new) but I've been embracing the fact that my kids are at the stage when they're happier having fun and so am I. A random older lady even joined me in playing monster. She just came up, said 'boo' and hid behind the display and left giggling. While hiding behind the display C&J found three hollow cardboard inner tubes and worked together to hold them just right so they'd make them a long tunnel for a dark blue ring they got at the dentist's office to fall through. The entire pharmacy line was watching them, spellbound, to see if the engineering was correct enough for the ring to make it through the tunnel on each drop. People even cheered a little when they made it.
I wish I could have frozen that moment and kept it cupped in my hands forever, that time when we waited at the pharmacy for 45 minutes but it felt a lot less and we entertained 7 people with a blue dentist ring. But strangely, I find savoring the moments hurts a little, like taking a deep breath in the dead of winter when the air tastes so good and clean at first and then the sharp cold completely burns your lungs. I start to savor, but then I get a little sad because it reminds me that it will soon be gone. Who knows when we'll be there again, and when we are the boys might be in kindergarten, or they won't want to play monster behind the saline solution. I read about someone who, whenever she got to a new place and started enjoying herself she'd say "I'm going to come back here", like she wanted to save the moment, expand it, hold onto it by pushing it into the future, instead of seeing it for what it was- transient, fragile as butterfly wings, about to evaporate when life pulls us to get in the car and deal with traffic and get dinner going. Her friend would point out that she probably wouldn't go back there, because there were other places to visit, other moments to experience, and even if she came back it wouldn't be the same. There would be different people, and different weather, and all the things that made that moment it's own peculiar blend of joy and pleasure and newness would all be different. There would never be another moment like that again.



A couple Saturdays ago we went to the ballfield next to the temple and just hung out. The kids found a bottle brush tree and played camping under it. Ian and I had such a great time just relaxing with them. I kept thinking, we need to come back, but again, who knows when it will be. Birthday Parties, service projects, bike rides on the beach, u-pick strawberry fields... there are a smorgasboard of things to do and only a handful of free weekends. By the time we get back here again Jack and Christian will be talking.
My friend recently told me about a book that's been described as "telling motherhood like it is, without the flowery nonsense." When shopping for books about being a Stay at Home Mom when I was trying to figure out my new 'job' it seemed like everything had something in the title about Surviving or Survival or something like "Only 16 Hours Until Bedtime", I remember another one with a teddy bear hanging by a noose, its head lolling to one side. The "grit-your-teeth-and-hang-on-for-dear-life-hope-to-see-you-on-the-other-side-of-this-alive" is pretty funny, not inaccurate, and it's everywhere. But I can't help but feel it makes it all out to be a trek of endurance, hair-brained and half-insane, gasping to hold on until I wave my kids off on their first day of kindergarten and slowly start to rebuild my life** (**although I don't deny there is some truth to this)


I may have days where I almost fall off my balcony trying to retrieve a lost throw rug, or I make my house smell like a packed smoker's lounge for an entire week because I badly burned the contents of three separate pans (including an entire pound of bacon and beans in a pot we got for our wedding that sadly had to go in the garbage) but every day I feel more and more like childhood is so alive, astonishing and amazing, almost more for me than for my kids, these perfect moments of rings down tubes and capes and bottle brush trees and shining eyes and dirty faces are so unbelievable in their quiet, perfect completeness that the whole world would just be so happy and I'm just so sure that all wars would cease if everyone got a few of these moments with their kids every day. Last week Julian wore his cape I made/pinned, for him to the mall playground and jumped off hamburgers and hotdogs, totally in the moment. I don't know who was more into it though, him or me. He was living, and I was doing the best I could to savor. I just wished I could have explained all of this to my new friend in the park.