It’s always that time right before dinner is ready, when kids are whining because they’re hungry and I’m trying to pour five glasses of milk and no one will set the table like I asked and the soup is boiling over, probably scorching on its bottom because I have no more hands to stir, that I just want to hide in the bathroom and pretend I have disappeared forever.

It’s always that window between Family Time and baths, when craft supplies need cleaning up and boys need to be herded upstairs and no one wants to stop in the middle of creating, including their daddy, but I can feel the clock and its friend crazy breathing down my neck, because I’m pregnant and don’t get to enjoy a glass of wine with dinner anymore that I just want to climb under my covers and pretend the whole world, my world, no longer exists.

It’s always that string of minutes between an alarm clock chiming and throwing back warm covers that I wish they could just get ready for school on their own, without my constant supervision.

And someday they will. But not today.

Today I will pull myself from bed and put their chalkboard schedules beside their bathroom door and I will walk down the stairs in darkness to start the oatmeal, and then I will dish that warm goodness into bowls and set them in their places and climb back up the stairs to take twins to potty before everyone comes trampling down and the madness really begins.

Today I will dress the littlest ones and help the middle one find shoes that are right in front of his face, and then I will remind the second oldest to pack up his red folder, and I will climb the stairs once more to pull the oldest away from the Legos and books he got at his eighth birthday party last weekend and remind him that he has only 15 minutes left to eat his oatmeal before we’re leaving.

Today I will walk exhausted and sucked dry and just a little overwhelmed because some can’t pour milk and some can’t tie shoes and some can’t put socks on without snagging a toe.

It will not always be so.

These days of raising five (going on six) boys 8 years and younger, they’re not easy, ever, but I have learned something in these years between child and adult.

Life is full of seasons, just collections of time we will look back on in the histories of our lives and wonder at how we made it in one piece or that we were chosen to live it or how extraordinarily we were changed.

No season will last forever.

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Just after my first son was born, I had one week of vacation and worked five more weeks from home so I could feed him when he needed feeding and hold him when he needed holding and love him a whole day long.

The days were shorter then, and my husband got home just after dark during the ending of those days.

My baby boy would sleep peacefully in a swing while I watched him from a couch, waiting for his daddy to get home, and the shadows would come crawling in from windows and I would let them, and there was nothing on the table for dinner and nothing I could do about it and nothing I could think but how we would never get back to the life we had before him.

Those days before a new baby were filled with spontaneous dates and trips to the grocery store when we wanted spinach dip with French bread and nights of full and sweet sleep.

I wasn’t ready for this forever change, not even after the eight months I’d had to wrap my mind around it.

And so, on the fourth night, when my husband came home to a dark living room and a sleeping baby, and when he put his arms around me to feel how my day had gone, I cried into his collared shirt and said the words that had been following me around all day.

Can we give him back? I said. I’m just not ready.

He was the perfect baby who slept and smiled and loved his mama hard.

But it was new and serious and terrifying, and that old life had passed away while I wasn’t looking, and I did not expect the new life to be so…hard.

It didn’t feel anything like a season in the middle of those dark nights, when a baby cried and a mama cried and a whole world felt like it was crying.

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Maybe we’re not ever ready for the season changes in our lives.

Because there are new babies and there are lost jobs and there is divorce and sickness and death and pain and grieving, and we want to give it all back.

We don’t want this season, because, from where we sit, looking out at all the brand new and the unanswered questions and the fear that follows us in and out of days, it feels like it might last forever.

Forever is just asking too much here.

We can’t do forever. We can’t do every day for the rest of our lives when we can barely even do today, this moment, right now.

It’s not easy to step away from those hard days and remember they will have an end. It’s not easy to look at the future without a spouse or a job or our health or the phone calls from our mom or the presence of our dad and see who we are becoming in the middle of the mess. It’s not easy to feel sickness or a doctor’s question mark or the loss of a baby and know that there is another side to suffering.

But there is. We just have to keep walking or limping or crawling toward that next season.

And if all we can do is lie on the ground and stare at a sky that has turned black and starless, there is hope for us here, too.

A new season will always come to meet us.

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Almost two months ago my boy, the oldest, was written up at school 16 times in 20 days for choosing to act outside of who he is, and we had no idea until we were sitting in a principal’s office where she shared his conduct violations in quick succession.

There were no signs at home, because he was his same old self, spirited and strong-willed but loving and kind.

It was unexpected and heartbreaking, knowing he was becoming the kid other parents warn their kids about.

I cried on the walk home from that meeting, and I burned from the inside out, because hadn’t we taught him better, and didn’t we have family values, and didn’t he know that we loved him more than anything he could ever do?

So why was this happening?

Sometimes there are seasons we would rather not trip through, seasons where a boy is acting out and a school psychologist is called in and an outside therapist is secured, because maybe he’ll open up to someone besides a mama and daddy.

Sometimes there are seasons where we have to brave the judgment looks of all those other parents, whose kids have probably told them stories about our boy, and we have to remember that our boy is good and kind and wonderfully delightful beneath all the layers of exaggerated stories and misinterpreted intentions and misguided beliefs.

Sometimes there are seasons when we will have to look straight in the eye a teacher who requested a classroom change because she couldn’t handle our boy anymore, and we have to know that she doesn’t know him like we do.

These seasons can chew us up and spit us out and then leave us to die.

Because they demand hard work, like digging to the very heart of a hurting little boy who has only ever known brother plus brother plus brother and no identity to call his own. They demand seeing past the surface of behavior into the thoughts and beliefs and insights of a child who can feel the stress and anxiety and contempt of others like it somehow tells the story of who he is. They ask us to step off a ledge into a darkness we cannot navigate on our own, because the next step is nowhere to be found.

All we want is to get out of seasons like this one, because they’re relentless, and we’re afraid, and we really, at the heart of it, just don’t want to fail.

Sometimes we need to sit and stay a while.

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The seasons of life are made to stretch us and squeeze us and make us brand new.

There are the hard and crazy years with children, when we learn how to love in all the hard places.

There are seasons when a job is doing well and money is swimming in and everything we touch turns to gold, when we learn humility and generosity, and there are seasons when the gold turns to dust and the job dries up, when we learn faith and hope and even greater generosity in the lean places.

There are the early romance years, when a relationship glides smoothly through rose-colored days and we dream of forever. There are the seasons when love feels like work and it’s all we can do to stick around and keep that forever-promise.

There are seasons of friends, when we have those support groups propped beneath us and we learn what it means to ask for help and rely on others. There are seasons when friends leave and we must learn to stand on our own.

All of these seasons have something to teach us about life and love and strength and endurance and triumph and truth and courage and wonder and miracles.

We won’t learn what they have to share if all we ever do is wish this, too, would pass.

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In 30 days my job will disappear.

We got the pink slip six weeks ago, and I haven’t yet done anything about it, because it was unexpected and disappointing and scary.

It still is.

On good nights, my husband and I will talk about our creative pursuits and our dreams and everything we’re good at, and the whole worlds feels like a huge arena of possibility, and we’ll look into the future with excitement and anticipation and hope for the chance to chase dreams.

On bad nights I’ll crumple into his arms, soggy with tears, because there’s the house and all the mouths to feed and a new baby on the way, and what are we going to do?

On these nights this good man reminds me that we have been here before, in another season of life, when the new felt alarming and the unknown stared from the dark and the whole world felt like it was coming to an end.

We always came out on the other side new and changed and better versions of our truest selves.

We will again.

These seasons, they all come and go. They all rise and fall. They all freeze and then they thaw.

And it’s only a matter of time before we thaw out of this one, too.

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So we wait.

Whatever season life sees fit for us, we walk or run or crawl, knowing that we will see our way out of those hardest seasons, but it will take time.

Sometimes there’s a summer, where we can hardly find a comfortable place to sit because we’re sweating and burning and trying to form a coherent thought in a head that’s on fire.

But summer gives way to fall, when the air lightens and we can send kids outside and the whole world feels kind and hopeful and full of harvest and thanks and warm goodness.

And then it all turns white and cold and we can only shiver in bed or shiver to breakfast or shiver through a whole didn’t-go-like-I-expected-or-wanted day because branches are cracking and breath is frosting and death of all that is beautiful is coming with a vengeance.

But life waits underneath it all, and it bursts forth in a new day, when we can breathe full and deep again, and what was frozen is purposed anew, wearing green.

We are recreated in all those seasons.

And none of them last forever.

Those anxiety pills you’re on? You won’t take them forever. Those problems you’re having with your boy? You won’t have them forever. Those mornings you feel sucked dry by all the child-leeches in your house? They won’t last forever.

The disagreement you had with your mother-in-law? It won’t last forever. The depression that knocks you to your knees? It won’t last forever. The sickness tying you up in knots? It won’t last forever.

So sit. Stay awhile.

And be transformed.