You Won’t Miss ALL of This

I write a lot about how fast time is passing, how my children grow figuratively and literally before my very eyes, and how I know now to really try to savor the moments when they are little. I mean every word of it, because it’s true — and having both an 11 year old and a 1 year old at the same time only makes those points more poignantly to me now.

But I always laugh to myself when I remember a particular phone call from a friend the week after she gave birth to her first child. “I have to ask you,” she said, weariness and hesitation heavy in her voice. “Do you… like your children? Because I am afraid I maybe just ruined my life?”

I laughed then to reassure her, and I laugh now because I’m pretty sure that every new mother has had the thought — acknowledged or not, out loud or not, fleeting or not — that maybe having a baby in fact ruined her life. Of course, we adjust to motherhood, and it gets better. We learn how to read our babies’ cues and we eventually get them to sleep. We stop feeling like we might break them. We stop feeling like they might break us — most of the time. And as our children grow up, we learn to appreciate the stages of baby- and childhood that pass and are over, stored now with their tiny sleep sacks or rompers in bins at the tops of closets and tucked away in the backs of our mind along with their first words and their first foods. We forget about those hazy day-after moments when we wondered if we had ruined our lives.

Talking to another friend recently about her personal current maelstrom of small children, I felt a little nostalgic for the crazy time when I had two under two. Even though it was nuts, it was still simpler than it is now — I have the bigger my kids get, the more complicated their problems and the accompanying parenting dilemmas become. “You’ll miss this someday, believe it or not,” I said without thinking, because sometimes I am a moron. “I know!” she cried. “That makes me feel even worse, because I feel guilty that I’m wishing it away and someday I will miss it!” That’s when I realized that as a mom no longer in those particular weeds, I have a duty to let my friends know that to parent mindfully, to be fully present, does not equate to appreciating every single moment of parenthood. I need to make sure that my friends know that when I say you’ll miss this, I do not mean you’ll miss all of this.

Becoming a mother is jarring, and parenting babies and small children means that every minute of the day is full of tedious details and timelines, whether you go back to work or not. It’s physical, all-consuming, crazy-making kind of stuff. The truth is, even when you’re doing it right — especially when you are doing it right — and even when it is going well in the moment, being someone’s mother is damn hard as a baseline. It’s the great equalizer. It’s hard whether you have one or three or eight. It’s hard whether you are single or married. It’s hard whether you are gay or straight, Christian or Muslim or Jewish, Democrat or Republican, East Coast or West Coast, Beatles or Rolling Stones, celebrity or civilian, rich or poor. There are degrees of hard, of course, but, bottom line? It’s just hard to be someone’s mother.

It makes sense that there are plenty of moments I do not miss about my children’s babyhoods. I don’t miss engorged breasts or angry babies who can’t latch to them, cracked and bleeding nipples, or ice in my swollen lady parts. I don’t miss the insane sleep deprivation that made me question my sanity and understand why it is used for torturing terrorists. I don’t miss the always perfectly timed projectile vomiting, the diaper blowouts, the crying of unknown origin, the vague sense that maybe I had no idea what I was doing, my hair falling out, or the crying in the carseat. But I do miss the newborns who gave me those experiences.

I don’t miss fishing small objects out of mouths, the face plants by new walkers and resulting goose eggs, the limp-body drops of protest, or the violent head thrusts of tantruming toddlers. I don’t miss chipped teeth, worrying about swimming pools and electrical sockets, or poop in the bathtub. I don’t miss scary fevers or stranger anxiety. But I miss the toddlers who had them.

If I’m being honest, I might not miss 3 year olds, like, as a whole. Don’t judge me. I call them “threenagers” for a reason.

With the entire canvas of childhood spread out for me in my own home between my oldest and youngest children, I am reminded daily not to wish time away. However, when my 5 year old made me chase him around a bench on a crowded sidewalk yesterday to get him back into the car — and it took me several tries to catch him, because he is small and wiry and I am decidedly not and also apparently ancient — well, yeah, I am not going to miss that. I’m not going to miss the growing surliness of impending adolescence, the picky eating, or the cajoling I have to do in order to get four human beings to make any transition, big or small, every day.

However, I do and will miss the relative simplicity of babies and toddlers, like I told my friend. I will miss elementary school each time a child leaves it, because elementary school is still when children can be children, despite our moans to the contrary. I’ll miss each stage as each child outgrows it, simply because these are my children and life is going so fast. Time is the one thing no one gets to have back. It’s the other great equalizer.

No matter how mindful we are, and whether we wish it away or not, time moves at exactly the same pace for us all: too fast. Our children are only allotted so many days of childhood, and when they are over, they are over. That is what makes childhood special. However, it doesn’t mean that parenting isn’t sometimes gnarly. It doesn’t mean that if we finally, somehow, manage to get our kids to lie still in their beds long enough to fall asleep and we tiptoe out of their rooms and slump to the floor in relief, beaten and wearied from the nightly battle, we aren’t appreciating our kids “enough.” Bedtime can be sweet and tender and a moment of connection for parents and children — except when it’s gutting and horrific. You will miss bedtime, but you won’t miss the bedtimes that left you without the will to live.

Perhaps the biggest gift of having a fourth child and having her later is that I am able to give myself the space not to miss everything. While I do mourn the passing of each stage because she’s my last baby, I also know that we have so much ahead of us to love. I know I will miss the baby and toddler she is now, but I also delight in knowing that engorged breasts and spit-up are behind me forever. I won’t miss that. And I know now that no, I didn’t ruin my life when I had my babies. I did, however, ruin my pelvic floor. Worth it.