This weekend I opened whole boxes of emotion.
I sat in a living room, sorting through all the clothes my boys wore as babies, washing them and hanging them and breathing them, and I arranged all those tiny unnecessary shoes into rows so they would be ready for this last baby of mine who will come any day now.
I pulled out the red outfit, the one my firstborn wore the night he first laughed, a sound I’ll never, ever forget, even though it’s been eight years. I found the shirt my second-in-line was wearing when he first gifted the smile that still melts my heart today. I showed their daddy the plaid shorts and white shirt, now stained irreparably, the third was wearing when he first walked out of his room on two feet instead of the four he used to bear-crawl his way around.
First Christmas, first swim day, first day home from the hospital. It’s amazing how many memories those clothes hold, how they mark time more surely than we can in our everyday lives.
Was he ever really this small, eight pounds instead of 58 pounds? How could these tiny swim trucks have fit the boy with legs long enough to put him level with my chest? How did that tiny baby become the one who graduates to the big boy side of the store in just a few months?
Where did the time go?
I tried not to cry, looking at all those clothes, remembering, but I am a mama.
These years of raising babies and toddlers and almost-adolescents make the days seem so long, but the years are incredibly short.
Before we even know it, before we’re really even ready, they come up to our shoulders and they weigh 58 pounds and they don’t need us like they used to.
Time to grow up.
Time to be their own people.
Time to let them fly.
It’s not easy, as a mother, to watch time slipping, because I can still feel their baby weight in my arms, and I can still see their eyes that would look upon a new world but first sought only mine, and I can still hear the babble of their baby talk. And yet now they dress themselves and brush their own teeth and buckle their own seat belts?
Time marched on, and it did not look back.
So often, in these days of great demand and need, when I walk most days with my head spinning, I just put one foot in front of the other, trying to make it to naptime so I have a few hours to finally breathe, and then I’m trying to make it to bedtime so I can finally get some rest to start it all over again tomorrow.
And in my surviving, I’m missing the beauty of a moment right here in front of me.
What will they remember of this childhood I have given them? Will they remember me hurrying from one thing to the next thing and never stopping to watch the way that chair makes a perfect curvy track for Lightning McQueen, or will they remember the way I stopped and watched until he was all the way to the table-mountain above the track?
Will they remember my apologetic dismissal when they want to tell me a story I know, from experience, will take them 45 minutes to finish, or will they remember that I stopped and looked them in the eye and listened like their words meant the world to me, even though the dryer just went off and if I don’t keep those clothes moving, I’ll never get the nine loads finished today?
Will they remember the way I yelled those times I was exhausted and overwhelmed and not quite myself, or will they remember the way I loved them in my words and my tone and my actions?
Time is not always a friend, because it tells the truth of our lives, how we wanted to take that camping trip together, but there was never any time; how we thought we’d start playing kickball in the cul-de-sac together, but we just ran out of time; how we always planned to make that Christmas video together, year after year after year, but there was not enough time.
But time is a forgiver. Time offers a hundred chances for us to get it right.
And so, when we pick up the boys, all wild and crazy from a weekend with the grandparents, I seize time like I seize them, and I gift them with whole presence.
The only gift that really matters.
The only gift that marches in step with time.
