We are eagerly awaiting the arrival of our sixth (and last) baby, another boy, and I have reached THAT point in pregnancy.
There comes THAT point in every pregnancy, when the days feel like they’re 2,000 hours long because of the other littles demanding time and attention, and the nights feel like they’re 4,000 hours long because you’re staring at a clock, hoping, hoping, hoping you can just, for once, for these last few days, fall asleep and stay asleep, since there is no promise of that once a baby comes.
You know you have solidly reached THAT point in pregnancy when:
You can’t turn over at night without moaning at the pain of trying.
You wake your husband and ask him to give you a little push, because you’re stuck on your back and you’re starting to panic and there’s the vena cava, and why do you suddenly feel so lightheaded?
You get up to go to the bathroom 40 times a night, and every single time you wish you had a walker to lean on, because your back seized up while you were lying down and you can’t even walk now.
In fact, every time you sit for longer than 15 minutes, you wish you had a walker.
Your back feels like every bone is broken.
When your husband complains about how much his back hurts, you snap, “Oh, please. Don’t even talk to me about a backache.” Because he really has no idea.
Every time you sneeze, you pee a little. Every time you laugh, you pee a little. Every time you choke on the water that went down the wrong way, you pee a little.
Your children tell you your belly is the biggest thing they’ve ever seen. Bigger than the moon and the basketball they played with in P.E. today and even bigger than the sumo boppers they got for Christmas.
Your belly is so big it forgets how to hold itself and starts sagging toward the floor.
You’re bent at a 45-degree angle (backwards) to counterbalance the baby weight on your front side.
You actually practice labor squats, bearing the hip pain, because surely the weight of the baby will break your water instead of your back like it’s been doing.
You pull a muscle trying to walk up the stairs.
You dream of running.
You wonder if running might induce labor.
You seriously consider going for a run.
You try to do your pregnancy yoga, and you get stuck on the floor.
You comb your closet for clothes that still fit, a shirt that at least covers your dropping belly, but there is nothing. So you tie a few scarves around your middle. They double as a belly bra, anyway.
You can no longer see your feet on the next step in front of you when you’re coming down the stairs, so you just hope you don’t miss one.
You nearly face plant when you trip going up the stairs (because you also can’t see your feet going up) and run the rest of the way, trying to keep your top-heavy balance, and then you laugh hysterically when it’s all over because you didn’t just die. Maybe you induced your own labor.
You can’t even pretend you’re a peppy, beautiful pregnant woman anymore. You can’t rally. You can only drag.
You waddle without even realizing it until your husband kindly points it out.
You can’t reach the silverware at the bottom of your sink while doing dishes without standing on your tiptoes, setting your belly on the counter and then hunching down to pick them up.
Your laptop will no longer fit on your lap.
You burn your stomach trying to cook grilled cheese sandwiches.
Pregnancy is a wonderful, beautiful time, until those last brutal weeks, when we vow to never, ever, ever do this again, never ever.
But then it will be over and we’ll have a tiny precious baby in our arms, and we’ll fall so deeply and irreversibly in love we’ll forget.
And it’s necessary to forget, of course it is. But sometimes it’s also necessary to remember, so we can keep that last-one vow, for whatever reason it needs to be kept.
If I had a dime every time I heard someone say something like, “Time flies. Cherish these days.” I’d be a millionaire. Or how ‘bout, “Time flies. You’re going to blink, and she’s going to be graduating from high school.” Many of us have heard the empty nester at the grocery store passionately declare, “It goes by all too fast. I remember when my little girl was her age.” Then there’s the stay-at-home parent line, “The days are long, but the years are short” (Okay, I’ve just been informed that’s from Grethen Rubin.).
Yes, it’s all pretty cliché, and still, it’s the truth!
However, some days it is really difficult not wanting your child to grow up.
Recently, when my 2 year old daughter, Caroline, jumped on the Frozen bandwagon (she’s only seen the movie once), it was pretty darn cute, and well, you know where I’m going with this…
Even though she’s the most precious ‘lil girl in the entire world, this just gets old…
Let it go. Let it go. Don’t’ hold it back anymore…
Let it go. Let it go. Don’t’ hold it back anymore… (Repeat – Repeat – Repeat – Repeat – etc. …)
I think I’ve read Peter Pan 4 times already today. It’s only 2:08 p.m. I’m going to set a new record before 8 p.m. I’d like to throw Tinkerbell against the wall, but my nonviolent convictions remind me to breathe deeply, smile, and remember that every adult battles the “Captain Hook” syndrome.
Do you want to build a snowman?
May I say, “NO!” please?
Everyone looks forward to the day their 2-year-old learns how to use the toilet. The parents with the 10-month-old are on pins and needles anticipating baby’s first steps. So many parents are thrilled the day their child stops sucking his or her thumb, throws away the lovy, and/ or drops the afternoon nap (so you don’t have to be at home from 1:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m. every single afternoon).
We are pumped for milestones, and this posture of living doesn’t seem to stop until the nest is, yet again, empty. Think about it. We—westerners—are all about what’s next, and we cannot wait for the next big thing in life, whether this applies to children’s development, career moves, vacations, “wins” at work, etc.
More often than not, we think the answer to life is summed up in the phrase, “Carpe Diem”—Seize The Day—but, while motivational at times, this timeless phrase is actually misleading and not very conducive to the seasons of ordinary life. “Carpe Diem” lifestyles seem to get in the way of real life and are rooted in the desire to achieve the next greatest milestone! The “Carpe Diem” world ironically misses out on cleaning diapers and listening to the Frozen soundtrack on repeat.
Most of the time, we—adults—learn lessons in hindsight. If we open up our Photo Stream at night and spend an hour looking at iPhone videos of our baby growing up, we usually get pretty emotional, to say the least. We end up sounding like the old lady at the grocery store inwardly reminding ourselves that life is too short. We want to do the impossible and freeze time. We see sacred moments that are somewhat long forgotten.
Have you seen Richard Linklater’s Academy Award-nominated gem, Boyhood? You will either love it or hate it, but everyone should learn to respect this original masterpiece of patient filmmaking. The story chronicles the life of a child and his family for 12 years until the boy goes off to college. Linklater aims to achieve presenting every-day events and the ups and downs of ordinary life for approximately 10 minutes of footage per year. Crazy! People love and hate Boyhood for the same reasons. The film doesn’t have a major plot with the typical film storyline and the three-part act. It is simply a movie about one’s life, the discovery of oneself through family drama, peer pressure, hobbies, pimples, haircuts and awkward relationships. Linklater manages to get the point across that life is not so much about “seizing the day,” but allowing the moments to seize you!
If parents are always looking for the “next big thing” this will only lead to disappointment and a glamorized “Carpe Diem,” epic fail! But if we allow the moments to seize us, we will be more willing to “let it go” and sing along for the 1,000th time with Elsa, Anna and Olaf! We might enjoy Peter Pan and the Lost Boys of Neverland and be more willing to give Captain Hook the boot!
Your child will get older. There will be a day when Peter Pan will only be known for Peanut Butter. Your child will no longer play with pixie dust, and Olaf—like seasons—will become a “happy snowman” puddle. Moments seize us 24/7 from the cradle to the grave.
The only tools we need are eyes to see, ears to hear, and a heart like a child. May the moments seize you, and may you learn to fly with time.
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.
It’s a celebratory day when kids are able to buckle their own seat belts and pour their own glasses of milk and bathe themselves and cook their own food (wait, when does this happen again? I’M READY ANYTIME, KIDS).
When they’re little, we spend so much of our days doing every single thing for them that every tiny little mastery feels like a major victory.
But in order for them to learn how to do things for themselves, in order for them to achieve autonomy, there is this frightening limbo between beginning and mastering when we must let them practice.
I say it’s frightening, because I know. Here’s what working toward autonomy looks like in our home:
Pouring milk
The 8-year-old: Check the level on the milk. If it’s less than half-filled, overcorrect, because you got this. If it’s too full, try anyway, and spill a whole ocean where you can let your Lego man swim before you try to clean it up. And by cleaning it up, you mean wiping it toward the floor so it soaks not only the counter but inside the drawers and cabinets, too. Conveniently forget to clean up the spills you can’t see that your mom will smell three days later. The 5-year-old: Only pour from a gallon that is less than half-filled, because you’re careful like that. The 4-year-old: Pour anytime you feel like it, but do it from the floor. Wipe up the mess you’ve made with a paper towel but no cleaner so the stickiness will steal someone’s socks tomorrow. Laugh hysterically when it does.
Tying shoes
The 8-year-old: Tie one, and then get really frustrated when the other one doesn’t tie as easily because everyone is talking. Tell everyone to be quiet so you can concentrate and then try again. Tell them to quit looking at you. Make three good attempts, and then take off your shoe that just won’t tie today and throw it across the room. Say you’ll go to school with only one shoe on. You don’t care. Change your mind five minutes before you’re supposed to leave, after you’ve forgotten where it landed when you threw it. Your dad will find it and help you put it on. The 5-year-old: Don’t even try. Your mom will do it.
Packing up
8-year-old: Look in your room for your agenda. Complain that you can’t find it, even though it’s sitting just beside your desk, right by the four thousand Lego pieces you dumped out last night and “forgot” to clean up. Say it’s gone forever. Say someone must have stolen it. Say you’ll never be able to write down your school assignments again. Ever. Say “You must have moved it,” when your mom comes downstairs with it. 5-year-old: Let your mom know you can’t find your red folder, then laugh when she pulls it out from under your lunch box, the same place it always is in the mornings.
Sweeping the floor
8-, 5- and 4-year-olds: Only sweep a square area of four tiles across and four tiles down. Don’t even try to get under the table, where all the food is. It’s too hard.
Wiping the table
8-, 5- and 4-year-olds: Push all the extra food to the floor by the sponge. Be sure to leave streaks all over the table, because you didn’t want to use the cleaner, OR leave a lake because you had a little too much fun spraying the cleaner and the sponge is too soaked to absorb anymore.
Doing dishes
8-, 5- and 4-year-olds: All the silverware must fit into as few slots as possible, even though there are six slots and three that are still empty. There is no rhyme or reason to putting dishes in; just throw them randomly in whatever space is available. After all, the dishwasher is like a car wash for plates and bowls.
Putting laundry away
8-year-old: Hanging clothes don’t have to be hung up, per se. They can be stuffed into the underwear drawer, because it’s not full, and all the other random empty drawers in the room. 5-year-old: Don’t pay attention to the labels your mom put up in the closet. Just put your clothes wherever you feel like putting them, even though you share your closet with three other brothers. That way, when you dress for school, you’ll have a legitimate reason for dressing in a shirt two sizes too small. “It was on my side,” you’ll say. 4-year-old: Get mad trying to hang up shirts, and throw your hangers across the floor so some of them break and your parents will help you hang up the rest. 2-year-olds: Rearrange the pajama drawer eight times a day because your parents let you put clothes in it once.
Putting on shoes
2-year-olds: It doesn’t matter if shoes don’t match or if they’re different sizes. Just put them on. Shoes are shoes are shoes. Stop trying to match them and put them on the right feet, parents.
Cleaning your room
8-year-old: Make sure all the books that are supposed to go on the bookshelves in your room end up in your bed instead. That way your mom won’t be able to find the library books when they’re due. Push everything else in the closet and shut the door. You don’t need the closet anyway, now that your clothes are stuffed in drawers.
Bathing
8-, 5- and 4-year-olds: You really only need to wash your hair, your belly and your feet. Everything else is already magically clean.
Dressing
8-year-old: Who cares if the sweatpants you’re wearing aren’t yours but belong to your 2-years-younger brother and look more like capris than pants? They were in your room, stuffed in a drawer. Make sure you leave your pajamas on the floor so they won’t make it into the laundry and you can complain two days after laundry that you don’t have any more pajamas. Also, make sure you forget to put your shoes on before getting in the car, because you just know there’s a pair in the car (there isn’t).
I know that eventually they will get good at all this, because practice makes perfect.
Right?
Rachel is a writer, poet, editor and musician who is raising five (going on six) boys to love books and poetry and music and art and the wild outdoors—all the best bits of life. She shares her fiction and nonfiction writings over at her blog, and, when she’s not buried in a writing journal or a new song or a kid crisis at home, she enjoys reading Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, William Faulkner and the poetry of Rilke. Follow her on Twitter @racheltoalson.
I love my kids very much! Maybe I didn’t fully know what I signed up for when having 5 of them (who does?), but I stand by and live with the choices and the gifts. They are amazing blessings and I can’t imagine life without them. I have to say those things (which are absolutely true) so that I don’t sound like a terrible person when I tell you that sometimes I just want to run away screaming from my house.
Raising young children is one of the most the single most challenging thing I have ever faced in my life. Stand up comedian Jim Gaffigan said it best when he described what it’s like to have 4 children (one fewer than we have). He said “Imagine you’re drowning… and then someone hands you a baby.” It’s true, I feel like I’m barely making it to the surface sometimes and gulping desperately for air before I am pulled back down into the swirling torrent that is parenthood.
These little people we call our kids can be incredibly adorable, inspiring, funny and surprising. Simultaneously they can be incredibly selfish, frustrating, infuriating and annoying. Not to mention, often one of the most maddening things about kids is that they act like a big fat mirror, reflecting back to you all of your shortcomings as a human being.
Oh, and the mess. I’ll admit, I’m not great at putting away my clothes and keeping my desk tidy, but it sometimes seems as if my kids’ sole purpose in life is removing cleanliness from any room they occupy. They are masters at this. It takes them 5 minutes (2 minutes if they work together) to completely undo hours worth of cleaning. Plus the food everywhere. How do you get food on the ceiling? And all of the bodily fluids. All of them! Like I said. Sometimes I just want to run away.
This is where the help comes in and literally saves my children and their on-the-brink-of-insanity parents. The help comes in many forms. It could be someone bringing us a meal or coming in and organizing a closet for us. It could be friends watching the kids for an evening or grandparents taking the kids for a weekend so that Rachel and I can hang out and communicate without having to shout over the noise or guard against the constant threat of interruption. It could be a couple giving us stuff that we might need because they’re a few years further down the road and they don’t need it anymore.
If you are a person who has done that for us or for someone else… there just aren’t words. You are a saint. You are a Godsend. You are an angel from heaven. Thank you, from the deepest place in my heart. Thank you! Because, despite my rambling vent about the difficulties, which are really more a reflection of my poor attitude than they are of our actual hardship, I love my kids so much. The help that you provide, whether in big ways or small, helps me to be a more whole person, and a better parent to my kids. The gifts that you give of your time or resources demonstrate for my kids what it looks like to be generous and what it looks like to receive generosity. The presence that you share with my kids offers them a more diverse perspective on life and how people interact with each other outside of our home.
One day our home will look completely different and we will have the ability to do the same for someone else on a more regular basis. We are excitedly looking forward to that day. It’s not out of a feeling of obligation or wanting to “pay it forward.”. We want to do it because we’ve seen the life and healing that it has brought to our family and how these acts of kindness are helping shape a hopeful future for our boys and the men they will become and we want to be a part of that for someone else one day. We’ve felt the joy of giving of ourselves in the small ways we can now.
If you have been thinking about reaching out to a family that might need help, but you’re worried about being weird or awkward, do it anyway. If you’re a mama or daddy who has trouble accepting help because your life feels too messy, or you don’t want to inconvenience people, or you don’t even know how to articulate the kind of help you need, TAKE THE HELP ANYWAY. The first step is always the hardest. And again, for anyone who is now helping or has ever helped our family, in big and small ways (there really are no small ways), I can’t say it enough… thank you.
(That’s me in the back corner, outnumbered by all these boys. Don’t I look tired? Yeah, well, I am.)
Every new year, my husband and I make goals for everything.
And I mean everything. Spiritual, financial, personal, business-related, marriage goals, family goals, reading goals, learning goals. All kinds of goals.
We don’t like resolutions, because resolutions are something you make and then break. We like goals, because goals are something we work toward and may or may not accomplish throughout the course of a year, but at least we know we tried—and just trying is to be applauded in the life of a parent.
I’ve been making goals since I was a kid. I know it’s a little weird, but I was always that kid. I wanted to finish my homework 10 minutes faster and play outside for 30 minutes more after school and eat black-eyed peas for New Year’s lunch without gagging.
These days my goals are hardly more refined, mostly because I’m now a parent.
Here’s a look at some of my parent-goals for 2015.
1. Get more sleep. Or nap more. Or pretend I’ve passed out for 15 minutes on the couch. Anything to get kids to leave me alone.
I realize this is most likely more difficult than my idealistic little mind can even grasp, since we have a new baby coming in February and everyone knows new babies, added to five already-existing boys, equals no sleep. It may even equal negative sleep. But I have not given up on this goal that cycles back around every year, because someday. I just know someday.
2. Stop walking barefoot around the house.
Have you seen this picture?
That’s my 8-year-old’s room, where his 300,000 Lego pieces have multiplied all over the floor. And while Legos are supposed to remain contained in his corner of the house, they somehow migrate into all the other rooms, which means it’s not even remotely safe to walk anywhere barefoot.
But why would I want to? My floors haven’t been cleaned in WAY, WAY, WAY too long. I can’t even stomach anymore what I may be stepping on.
Why are my socks sticking to the kitchen floor? I don’t really want to know.
Everyone got slippers for Christmas this year, so that’s what we’ll all be wearing from here on out.
3. Clean the house at least once.
Hey, when you’re the mom of five, going on six, boys, you have really, really, really low expectations. Boys undo all the hard work in seconds, just as soon as they decide to go to the bathroom. On that note…
4. Mark my bathroom as a “no boys allowed” space.
Lately we’ve been breaking up the boys for baths, bathing half of them in our nice garden tub and the other half in their own, smaller tub. My nice garden tub is now disgustingly dirty. I really don’t know where all this dirt comes from. Their hair? Their faces? The bottom of their feet? I have a theory. Dirt comes from boy.
Not only have they destroyed my garden tub, but they use my toilet, the one toilet in the house I’d like to call mine. Sometimes they forget to pull the seat up (I realize this is the opposite of many of their male counterparts, but it’s just one of the weird variations my boys have on habits of the male species), and since I’m usually the first one to sit on the seat after it’s been abused by a boy…well, let’s just say I feel like crying when there is wetness that shouldn’t be there.
They are also, obviously, very proud of what comes out of their bodies into the toilet and so leave it there for all the world to see.
Please, please, please, just give me a bathroom of my own.
5. Budget for a house cleaner.
I know this seems like the easy way out, but all the bathrooms in my house (including mine) smell like pee and wet dog and dirty socks, and the glass surfaces (mirrors supposedly hung in kids-can’t-reach places and a glass-top dining room table…what were we thinking???) are so smudged you can’t even see your real face in them. Sometimes you’ll wonder if your vision is going.
A house cleaner would be nice, I think, because I can’t possibly keep up with all the hands and feet and elbows and knees and other parts that shouldn’t be mentioned here.
And, honestly, I don’t know that I want to.
6. Read fewer articles that lie to me.
These would be articles like those titled, “How to never have to clean your home” (about how people maintain on a daily basis so there’s no deep cleaning that ever needs to be done) and “12 easy home projects to do in 15 minutes” (kids add three hours to that 15 minutes) and “eating paleo can be affordable.” These people have clearly never had children. Or five.
7. Go a whole day without whining or complaining. Invite my children to do the same.
Sometimes we get in these funks as parents, whining and complaining about what they’re doing or not doing, and all the while they’re watching us, and when we say, “Please talk in your big boy voice. I can’t understand you when you’re whining,” do you know what they’re thinking?
Same goes for you.
Yes, the same goes for us. So maybe one way to get our kids to stop whining and complaining is to stop doing it ourselves.
This might take some work.
8. Get better at asking for help.
I know our society encourages us to pretend like we’ve got everything perfectly handled. But we don’t. Maybe we do about 5 percent of the time. Or 1 percent of the time. The other 95-99 percent of the time we’re one dangerous thread away from snapping into crazy-parent mode, and we’re wishing there was some kind of help and feeling mad at ourselves for not asking in the first place.
Asking for help isn’t weakness. It’s strength that isn’t often celebrated.
I don’t know how many of these goals will become a reality, but a mom can dream, right? And I’m dreaming big for 2015.
