Some thoughts from a few years back…
I lie there with my 5-year old son, as most nights, waiting to hear the regular breathing that signifies sleep, waiting to sense the quiet stillness that eventually descends when he gives in–at last–to slumber. The light in the hallway is on and the door is open, so it’s not completely dark. I watch the fan turn slow windmill shadows on the ceiling and wrestle with the urge to replay the day in my mind.
Many nights, I doze off before he does (I think), exhausted from the million demands of being a wife and mother and working (another) full-time job. But some nights, like this one, he slips off before me, tuckered out from a full day of Kindergarten and bike riding and basketball practice and trying to explain to me the complex dynamics at play among the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
And so I am left to think for a few minutes about the day. Whether we managed to get through homework battle-free, whether we made it everywhere we were supposed to go, whether I conquered the day without turning into a screaming lunatic. (Sometimes I get so close only to blow it during the torturous brushing and flossing and rinsing of the teeth.) Did we read? Did we cuddle? Did I listen with full attention to their stories and worries?
This quiet time is odd for me. It should come as a welcome respite during a largely chaotic life. Instead I don’t quite know what to do with it. Part of me wants to tiptoe out right away, flee to a book with no rhyming words, escape to a television show for grown-ups, reacquaint myself with my husband’s eager arms. But I convince myself to stay for a while longer. I watch my son’s handsome, peaceful face and run my fingers through his soft brown curls. I detect a slight sucking motion from his mouth every so often. He looks so supremely happy, having transported himself all the way back to the good old booby days when life was simple and his every need taken care of.
I feel silly to be just lying there drinking him in–still signed up for an hour-long bedtime routine when he’s five and my daughter nearly seven. Sometimes, though, it’s the only still time I manage all day. I cannot pinpoint exactly when this went away with my stepdaughters, this labor-intensive phase of parenting when we remain actively involved in bathing and brushing teeth and bedtime. It just sort of melted away, sometime between when they were eight and ten. My littler ones were very little then, even more all consuming of my time than now. I did not register exactly when or how it happened. They gradually ask for less and less help and eventually stop asking nearly all together. And I alternate between thrilled and sad, and wondering which is the correct way to feel…
Three years have passed since I wrote this and I suspect we may be at the tail-end of the phase when I feel like the center of my son’s and daughter’s universes. Some days the other end of the tunnel is visible and other days the tunnel seems another thousand miles long. Many days there’s no tunnel at all; just open road. I can see the horizon but not beyond. I still feel simultaneously excited and terrified about what’s ahead. (And my son is still an absolutely terrible sleeper.)
Brownie Stew 