Objects in Mirror
Time is marching on and I’m feeling that familiar pressure to forcefully cram lovingly impart all my Wisdom to my son before he’s on his own. A week has gone by and I have made exactly none of the healthy, good-for-you recipes from Pinterest I vowed to try. The bathroom scale mocks me each morning as I step out of the shower. It’s the middle of February and the fragile optimism I held so gently in my hands at the start of the year has started gasping for air as I realize several of my goals for 2015 have yet to see progress.
Gary Larson has a classic Far Side cartoon that illustrates how I’m feeling. When I’m focused on meeting all the expectations, trying to keep my eyes on the 16 different balls I’m juggling, all of a sudden there’s a startling eyeball coming up on my right. Objects in mirror are closer than they appear? Yikes!
When my kids were young, this eyeball was all the stuff I wasn’t doing, catching up to me. The day would start out with such promise and I had so many things I’d want to accomplish, but it could (and usually did) turn on a dime. All my best intentions forgotten, I’d be struggling through the grocery store with frozen food piled on top of my daughter in the basket while my son gummed handfuls of crackers into a soggy mess down the front of his shirt.
Inevitably, some random sweet older woman would give me that look in the checkout line, and I’d think, “Uh-oh, here it comes.”
“Look at your sweet angels. You should treasure each moment, honey. It all goes by in a flash. They’re only like this for the blink of an eye.”
“Really?” I’d think, “because last night when I was changing wet sheets at 2 a.m. it seemed like an eternity.”
The same thing would happen when I was in the middle of the daily exorcism that was my life with a teenage girl. Women who’d been through it with their own offspring would tell me it was just a phase and all but pat me on the head. Oh, a phase? You mean like werewolves go through when they shape-shift? Cool.
What I needed, what I think all moms really need at the core, instead of a wise wink and platitudes that this, too, shall pass and pass quickly, is acknowledgement that what I was doing was hard. The hardest. Physically exhausting, emotionally draining, repetitive, often unrewarded work. I would have preferred a thumbs up, a conspiratorial nod, like they understood that I was doing my best, despite the screaming and tears (from me, not my toddlers or teens).
I was in the mall food court the other day with my teenage son, and it was so crowded we shared half a table with a young mom and her three little ones. The oldest, maybe 4, was up and down after each bite of lunch, kneeling, squirming, and twirling in his seat. It was just a matter of time before he slipped and fell–and I automatically caught him, hands smeared in ketchup, before he hit the ground. His mom was so apologetic. She’d been tending to her baby on her other side when he fell.
“It’s ok,” I said and gestured to my man-child son across from me. She gave me the most grateful look and said, “Yes, so you know. Except he’s big now!” We shared a laugh and I helped her clean up the ketchup all over the table. I didn’t tell her that her kids would not be little like that for long.
Because it’s universal: all moms want is someone to tell us we are doing ok even when it looks like it’s all falling apart. There is no reminder that can guilt her any more than she’s already guilting herself. There is no criticism you can speak that she hasn’t already spoken a hundred times. She’s constantly second-guessing and blundering her way through parenting the best she can, having moments she’s not proud of and moments that she’d never thought she’d be strong enough to endure.
She’ll figure out on her own that the days are long, but the years are short. Those thousand things that seem to be bearing down on you inevitably change into a sense of time passing too quickly.
Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.
They creep up on you and take your breath in surprise. I look in the rear-view expecting to see my toddler son and suddenly there he is all biceps and big feet, the sweet voice that used to sing Itsy Bitsy Spider now cracking as it strains towards a new sort of bass sound. I call my daughter some days imagining her twirling and skipping and am blown away by her independence and self-assurance.
I used to sing a Hans Christian Andersen song as a lullaby to my children every night.
Inchworm, inchworm,
Measuring the marigolds.
You and your arithmetic will probably go far.
Inchworm, inchworm,
Measuring the marigolds,
Seems to me you’d stop and see how beautiful they are.
(2 and 2 are 4, 4 and 4 are 8, 8 and 8 are 16, 16 and 16 are 32)
It was a good daily reminder, after the grocery stores and the arguing, to stop a minute and really look at my kids, drink them in with all their gifts and strengths and failures and faults.
Of course the women were right–we should all treasure the moments. But if we aren’t carpe-ing each diem with zest and glee, it doesn’t mean we have failed. If we stood in awe and amazement during all the moments of every day, we wouldn’t really be honestly living those moments. Instead, we’d be standing around goggling at the beauty and sweetness and letting some important work slide. It’s only in hindsight, no matter how many reminders you get from the well-meaners, that you see the golden field of marigolds you’ve tended.
As Solomon observed, there’s a time and season for everything. A time for tantrums and a time for lullabies, a time for hissy fits and a time for shared confidences. A time for savoring and a time for soldiering, eyeballs and inchworms.