By Kerri Havnen Gordon
The Living Experiment
“These are long days and short years,” a friend from my moms’ group said 12 years ago. The rest of us nodded in agreement. At the time, we all had babies and suffered from the continual, physical exhaustion endemic to caring for the littlest of children.
We had months - years? - of waking in the night, days spent with aching arms and jelly-like legs from endlessly walking our babies. We longed for our precious cherubs to nap so we could also rest, but we usually spent nap time catching up on other, less rewarding duties.
As the afternoons waned, we were guilty of staring at the clock and praying for our husbands to return home. Knowing they were tired, too, we tried not to do the typical “baby handoff,” but it was hard to resist. We were exhausted, in mind and body, deliciously spent after being with baby round the clock.
Indeed, those were long days.
And then, suddenly, our babies grew ever more quickly. Their dresser drawers were revolving doors of new and outgrown clothes. Those babies morphed into capable little people with personalities and preferences and friendships.
And we moms said to each other, “How easy life will be when they go off to school. We’ll miss them, but look at all that free time we’ll have! All day!”
And so they went off to school, and curiously we didn’t seem to have any more time. In fact, our lives were more complex, filled with a new school community, sports teams, music lessons, playdates and homework help. And some of us went back to work part- or full-time, or dove into volunteer work, or both. Busier than ever, from morning to bedtime, we were tired still, after days ever longer and fuller.
Meanwhile, the kids kept blooming like spring wildflowers until inexplicably, more than a decade after those first moms’ group gatherings, we are now facing the end of grade school. In a panic, we realize, “The years! Where have they gone?”
Our children have now evolved into complex beings and we both celebrate and mourn their growing up. How beautiful they are. How grown up they look and seem. How they vacillate in a flash between childlike exuberance, glimmers of wisdom and adolescent angst.
Ah, such short years.
We’ve adjusted to how quickly the time goes, but we do not like it. In just a few years, there will be high school and drivers’ licenses and dating and college entrance exams. And occasionally, we long for those delicious but exhausting babyhood days when life was uncomplicated, when worries were simple and few, when we thought we had control over everything concerning our children.
But we don’t. The years pass as quickly as the days, it seems; and somehow we keep up with the frenzied pace of our children’s growth. When we catch our breath for a moment, we sometimes look ahead and wonder how on earth we’ll ever be able to let them go when it is time to do so.
The six years until my elder son’s high school graduation seems like plenty of time to prepare all of us for the next stages in our lives. Plenty of time, I reassure myself, until that nagging voice reminds me about those long days and short years.
Having been a mother for a dozen years, I have learned enough to know these last years at home with my sons will be gone in a flash, in the speedy blink of a nostalgic, joyful and sometimes teary eye. The best I can do is to savor each day, however quickly it passes by.
Gordon’s column appears monthly in the Town Crier. E-mail: livingexperiment@pacbell.net.
Gordon’s column is published the second week of the month. Send comments and suggestions to: Livingexperiment@pacbell.net
