Category: Blog

It hit me today watching my bare butt toddler hurrying up the stairs.

Someday I’ll never see that little bare butt walking around my house again, because one day it won’t be so little.

Someday there will be boundaries not even mom can break through, wounds I cannot heal.

Someday I’ll miss the freedom of kissing her anytime I want, having a built-in snuggle buddy.

Someday when the nest is empty and she’s gone and moving on, I’ll have to learn to let her go.

I’ll be left with only the hope that I did my due diligence as her mother.

Someday she’s going to grow up and be more herself and become a little less “mine”.

Someday I will have to hand her over to this great big, wild world.

It hit me hard watching that little bum leave me at the bottom of the stairs.

You never really know when it’s going to be the last time you watch it walk away unclothed or unafraid.

I know I will never get these moments back when my child is little and largely untouched, unscathed by reality and it’s experiences.

I know right now she doesn’t understand why I take these moments to sit back and take it in, why I’m always clicking pictures… 

But someday, when I’m up to my eyeballs in grandchildren and there are little bare butts too fast for me to catch…

I’ll thank my child for giving me the most precious and cherished times of my life.

And I just know, she will thank me back.

“I gave up my career to do this” I would always say. To do this thankless job, in this thankless society.

Now, I wake up and bring my only baby to school and pick her up 8 hours later.

I used to be able to name every snack, heal every ache and thoughtfully calculate her every move.

Now I pick her up and she’s begging to eat, we’re both tired and exhausted. She tried fish sticks at school. I didn’t even know that.

I can feel her slipping away.

She’s getting bigger in ways I thought would creep in, but instead came cascading.

She wants to know about why people die, she wants to talk about life.

She’s insightful, but also often reminds me that we are all going to be okay.

She tells me when she’s impressed, disappointed and exhausted.

She tells me when I’m wrong and she remembers everything she hears.

I get this pagne in my chest like I can feel her slipping away.

But maybe, I hope she’s slipping to a place where I don’t have to teach her what to think; she just thinks it.

A place where she doesn’t pick the flowers, she grows them.

To a place where I don’t have to show her how to form an opinion because she doesn’t need me for that; she has her own.

To a place where she leads me, instead of a place where she is being led to.

To the very place we’re all meant to slip through before we’re jaded by life and society’s hardening, a place that we forget.

A place that only children can lead us back to.

It’s not the same. Domestic duties have doubled, so has the bickering.

The spare time we used to cash in on live music and overnight trips we now spend crunching finances and wishing we could sleep.

We used to meet on lunch breaks, we couldn’t wait all day to see each other. Now our time is divided.

Spread between play-dates, working, planners, realizing maybe it’s time to optimize a healthier dieting situation, and also repeatedly failing to make the time to do that.

It’s not the same. Somehow it’s easier, more comfortable, complete.Now, we have a system.

You haul, wash, and dry the laundry and I spend the week folding and putting it away.

We communicate without words and laugh off misunderstandings that used to make me worry.

You depend on me to hold down the fort at 9 am, I depend on you to save the day by 5 o’clock.

You are our pillar of strength, I am our loving arms.

We work tirelessly to do the most important job in the world, and we do it together.

I’ve loved every version of you that I’ve known, but watching you be a dad is by far my favorite.

The highs and lows of life may change and age us, but the beauty of parenting this child together will always embrace us.

It’s true, it’s really not the same.

It’s so much better.

I talk about the fast forward button in life more than I am proud to admit.

To a still-screen shot when my daughter is school aged, emotionally well-adjusted, the house is orderly, and dinner is planned for the week.

But it’s times like these that slow me down.

When this charming, tiny, green-eyed girl that I gave to this world asks me to literally stop and smell the flowers.
I never stopped before her. I never took it all in… until now.

I remind myself that soon, I’ll be a full-time working mom and she’ll be going to kindergarten.

She’ll come home with homework, the house will be orderly, the meal plans will be executed with care and I will be aching for those days we could walk, laugh, and smell the flowers together.

So I pay my respect to the pause button and take in every moment of her being little, just a little longer.