The other day I was on the phone with my mother. My husband was out and I had just given my toddler a bath. She was standing in her bedroom, a towel draped around her little shoulders, her gorgeous, curly hair dripping water onto the rug. She was giggling and wiggling away from me as I tried to wrestle a diaper onto her bare bottom, her pudgy feet moving in place as I hugged her close around her belly, breathing in her freshly-washed baby skin.
My two boys were howling with laughter, the sight of their sister’s bare butt and some silly game they had been playing clearly too much to handle.
“Oh I miss those days, honey, when you guys were little,” my mother said over the noise, her voice a little wistful.
But she stopped there. She didn’t go on and on – about enjoying it while I can or not taking it for granted – like well-meaning old ladies in the grocery store sometimes do. She left her longing hanging in the air, an emotion for me to catch at my leisure and contemplate later, on my own time.
I smiled. The thing was, I actually was enjoying the moment, perfect in its imperfection.
I wasn’t trying to do a million things at once. I wasn’t annoyed because my children’s antics were keeping me from completing the next task on my never-ending to-do list, the bills, the laundry, the spaghetti sauce that was hardening in the pot on the stove. I wasn’t responding to a text, checking email, lurking on Facebook or trying to perform a twisted combination of all three. I was just being with my kids, my mom happily listening in on our little version of animal house via speakerphone
But I know someday, I am going to be my mother. (In many ways, I already am.) My kids are going to grow up quicker than I’d like and I’m going to long for those bare bottom moments with the howling laughter soundtrack. I’m going to look back and wonder where the time went, wonder what happened to those pudgy feet and smooth-skinned faces laughing their kids’ laughs and rolling on the floor in hysterics over nothing. It’s inevitable, I know this, but I’m looking for ways to stall.
As I write this, the first day of school looms in our immediate future, just 24 hours away. At this time tomorrow morning, summer’s easy breezy ways will abruptly come to an end, it’s finality crushing. My oldest son will get out of bed, his eyes heavy with sleep, and ask to watch an episode of Phineas and Ferb, a cartoon about two inventive brothers on an endless summer vacation. “You don’t have time for that today,” I’ll say. “You have school.”
And so we’ll begin September’s bittersweet march.
We’ll start to chip away at the summer laze that has left us relatively unhurried. We’ll rush through breakfast. I’ll hound my son to brush his teeth while he studies his rock collection, still in his pajamas. I’ll tell him to put his shoes on three times before he actually does it. Remind him not to forget his lunch. Or his backpack. Then, we’ll all walk my newly-crowned third-grader around the corner to the bus stop. On the way, I’ll wonder if my kids had the epic summer I planned when June opened up seemingly infinite possibilities just nine weeks ago. Will he remember the lake house, the beach, Boat Camp and lazy summer afternoons?
A swirl of emotions will hang above us in the air: sadness and excitement, uncertainty and anticipation, the nerves that cause that familiar ache in our stomachs, the ache my son thinks I don’t know about, but one I will be feeling right alongside him as he climbs aboard the school bus.
I’ll hold my younger children’s hands and we’ll watch as the bus drives away, my son’s face pressed up against the window, waving goodbye. He’s still my little boy. But in my heart I know that he’ll return home that afternoon just a little different from the kid he was when he left that morning. I don’t want to say it, but his childhood is running away, faster than I’d like. All my kids’ childhoods are.
As the days pass, our family will eventually fall into our busy school-year routine. Hockey season will start and we’ll be squeezing in classes at the dojo. There will be PTO and Youth Hockey board meetings, music class and homework and deadlines. My middle child will start his second year of preschool and I’ll go through the emotions all over again. The lazy days of summer will be firmly behind us.
But this September, I’m going to try and do things a little differently. I’m going to worry less about the crusty spaghetti sauce or what’s going on in my virtual world. I’m going to open up my eyes a little more to what’s happening around me. Instead of hurry up let’s go there’s no time for that, I’ll focus instead on making the most of the little moments that happen between the big ones. Because it’s those little ones that actually matter. The ones that are bare-bottomed and filled with howling laughter and generally inconvenient to life’s daily duties, but so pertinent to the bigger picture.
The great Ferris Bueller once said, “Life moves pretty fast. You don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
And this school year, I don’t want to miss a single thing.
This column appears in the September 2013 issue of Merrimack Valley Parent.
