They Grow Up So Fast

Those who spend any amount of time talking parenting with me will, no doubt, be familiar with my frequent laments about the age of my children, specifically that I can't wait for them to NOT be this age anymore so that I might regain just a smidgen of my personal freedom and individuality. I have, pretty much since Norah was born, been openly pining for the day when the pair of them are in school and I can have my days back. Partly I do this because it is true--GOD I want these kids in school so that I can have me time again. But mostly I do it because that is part of my personality. I grew up a farmer, and farmers talk hard times. It's what they do. It's what they know. It might not be entirely how they feel, but that's how it usually plays out in the public eye.

Still, I am singularly aware of just how lucky I am, and I fully appreciate the opportunity that I have to raise our children--to spend every day with them and to enjoy their developing personalities and to be a part of the fun, the marvel, and the challenge of growing up. Few days go by when I don't truly, deeply love what I do and take great pride and joy in the doing of it (though, those few days DO happen, usually when too little sleep or some sickness or other has gripped me thoroughly, and those are very unfun days).

But there is a very fine line between GETTING to stay home with the kids and HAVING to stay home with the kids. Every day I vacillate between these feelings of privilege and subjugation a bit wildly. At one point I might relish the opportunity to "play army" with Gabe or to flip through the pages of a book with Norah, but a short time later I might feel painfully disinterested in, once again, being forced to build another lego creation that will be destroyed in two minutes with Gabe or helping Norah with her colors, knowing full well she will not stay at the table with them and I'll be wiping colorful streaks off the windows again a short time later. I spend most of my time somewhere in the middle GEVING . . . or HATTING . . . to be with my children. I'm not sure either of those words work, but you get my meaning. Perhaps bittersweet is a better way of putting it.

And, though my personality prompts me to express the bitter aspects more often than I should, I do have an abiding appreciation for the sweet parts as well. Having small children means having little creatures around you that depend wholly on your presence. But, more than NEEDING to have you around to do things FOR them, they WANT to have you around to do things WITH them. They want to experience your world and learn more about it. They want to be a part of it, and they want to share their joy of discovery and exploration with you. They want the experience to be mutually fulfilling--meaning, they want you to love what they are doing as much as they love what they are doing.

This, of course, is a very weighty obligation. Anyone who tells you that smashing play-doh for thirty minutes of every day for three or four years will keep being fun is feeding you a line of bull or trying to convince themselves that they aren't (or haven't) wasted a considerable amount of their own time and energy doing exactly that. But, the good news is, it IS possible to fake it most of the time, and play-doh eventually dries out, and if you don't buy anymore, then magically you can move on to something different for awhile.

There is somewhere specific that I was going with this, and it is rather related to this topic, but I'm not sure there is an easy way to transition from the complexities of maintaining genuine enjoyment in child rearing and what happened this morning with Gabe. So I'm just going to, rather disjointedly, jump over to what went down at school this morning.

Throughout this school year, every morning when I dropped Gabe off, I would schlep Norah into his classroom, set her down and let her play for a minute or two, help Gabe pull his show-and-tell item out of his bag, put it in the basket, then take off his coat, and hang his coat and bag up in his little cubby. Then I would talk briefly with his teachers and watch as he explored whatever the day's special activities were going to be for a wee bit. After this, I would give him a hug, tell him to have a good day, and he would go about his business. I would pick Norah up, we would say goodbye again, and then I would take her back out to the car and go home. Twice a week I've done this since the school year started in late August or early September, whenever.

It was our little morning ritual. I say "was" because I think it might have ended today.

For the past two weeks, when we've gone down there with him, he's been rather anxious to get me back out the door, saying things like, "You take Norah and go home now." He's never been one to mince words. The teachers and I had a good chuckle about this, but I always gathered Norah up shortly after that and we left (which has become increasingly more difficult as she REALLY wants to stay in there and play with all the marvelous new things the school has to offer instead of coming back to our boring old house--so, in that sense, this development might not be a bad thing, because her tantrums were starting to be a bit much).

This morning he took the next logical step. After I got him out of the car and as I was going around to get Norah out from the other side, Gabe went up to the school door and said, "You open the door and I will hug you then you will go home." He didn't want me to come in anymore. He didn't want Norah to come in anymore. He didn't want me to help with his coat and bag. But, probably most significantly, he didn't feel like he NEEDED me to do any of that for him anymore. He wanted to do it on his own. He was taking his first step towards independence, and, while he's been showing more signs of wanting to do his own thing here at the house, this really marks a pretty BIG step in my mind as this is him going out in the world on his own and not just playing in his room with his toys.

Despite what he wanted, I still walked him into the building and helped him get his show-and-tell item out of his bag, but then I sent him into the classroom on his own and let him (well, probably mostly his teachers) sort out the hanging of his coat and bag and all the rest of it. But still. A pretty big step, and it won't be long before he doesn't want me to do more than let him out of the car and make sure he gets inside.

Soon, the days when he wants to snuggle on the couch, or give me a hug for no reason, or tell me he loves me out of the blue will be gone. Before long, he won't want me to help him set up his army guys or build him another lego creation to destroy in two minutes. He won't need me to start him a movie or get him a cup of chocolate milk or make sure he's wearing underwear. He will officially become a big boy, and Libby and I will become little more than providers of meals and shelter. He will become his own person, and we will have to relearn how to be our own people again.

The farmer in me is, I have to admit, rather overjoyed at this prospect. But the Dad in me is a little heartbroken. As I said, bittersweet. But that, in a nutshell, is parenting, and there's nothing I can do but push on and hope that someday, when he has his own children, he will at least be able to relate to everything that we've gone through for and with him.

Note: One last thing on the concept of children growing up fast. They don't. Time, in fact, is a constant. Children do change rather rapidly as they have a tendency to grow and mature as they learn things (which adults, more often than not, don't, so that is likely where the disconnect comes). However, these years do SEEM to go by quickly. That is only a misperception on the part of the parents precipitated by the fact that 90% of their days go by in a fugue of sleep deprived half-consciousness. That time does kind of fly by because, when you're only half awake and doing the same things day after day, the days do seem to kind of slip by. All one has to do to realize that time is still going by at the normal rate is to think back and try to picture every sleepless night in the past few years, or every episode of Dora, or every diaper change, or every meal prepared and/or personally spooned into a waiting mouth. Quickly it becomes apparent that there are too many of these things to count, and some of the more memorable ones will seem like a lifetime ago. Weigh that "lifetime" against the "blink of an eye" of the child growing up, and time starts to regain its proper perspective. Now, send that kid off to school and get something done for a change!