My boys went back to school this week - to their second-to-last years, respectively, of high school and middle school.
Like almost every aspect of parenting, this is one of those incredibly mundane and ordinary facts which, when it happens to you, is personally experienced as agonizingly profound.
Because, as my colleague Mary Louise Kelly put it in her poignant memoir this year, It. Goes. So. Fast.
I’ve been hearing that for years. Mostly from older women, when I was a young mom, with the grating advice to “enjoy every minute.” So many of those minutes, if I’m honest, are long forgotten - blotted and blurred away by the rush of life, of long hours at work, parenting through sleep deprivation, navigating worries about money and childcare, and balancing family dynamics.
The ones that remain are a swirl of walks in the neighborhood, trips to the ice cream store or the park, tedious road trips, vomit in my hair, the kitchen in Des Moines covered in flour after I turned away - just for a second - from whatever I was baking. And that downy hair, the fluffy cheeks, and the sweet little faces.
Those faces are sprouting hair now. Their voices have dropped. One of the boys is taller than me and the other lets me know almost daily that he’s just about there, too.
Lately, it almost hurts to watch them together. The jousting. The inside jokes. The cuddles. I can feel it ending. I can see the sun setting on their childhoods and I want to stare at its beauty but also look away because…it hurts.
I’ve recently finished a memoir about growing up evangelical. That’s involved some painful wrestling with how I was parented, how I’m parenting differently, and what I, surely, must be doing wrong myself.
And so, like every parent, I’m asking myself the most predictable question: How did it go so fast? Where did it go? Have I been doing it right?
I just know I’m trying to do my best. I hope it’s enough.
This was lovely. It doesn't all go away as much as it evolves into new wonders. I promise!