I waved goodbye to you as you headed to school on your birthday (an inch taller than the day before, surely, and with a confident new bounce in your step), and suddenlyit hit me: You are halfway to an adult. I don’t know how to get my mind around that, because at the rate the years are speeding by, 18 is bound to sneak up on me like some kind of time-slip ninja.
We went on a family vacation to South Dakota this summer, and your favorite part was visiting the Badlands. “It’s like walking on Mars!” you kept exclaiming, your awe mingled with adventure. Before I could shout something vaguely cautionary, you were scampering over hills and scaling rocks like a mountain goat.
With visions of catastrophic falls and skinned knees dancing in our heads (to say nothing of lurking rattlesnakes), Dad and I had an airtight plan: We’d simply keep you and your brother right beside us so we could catch you if you fell. It quickly became clear, however, that you are much more gazelle-like than we are. So we tried a backup plan: We’d just keep you in our line of sight. Even this was a challenge, given your double dose of agility and fearlessness. And at a certain point, I had to admit to myself: Even if we’re right there, is there anything we can do to stop you from cascading down a rocky ledge?
***
The name doesn’t do the place justice—the Badlands are truly remarkable. The hills took us by surprise, rising out of nowhere from an unassuming stretch of prairie. The scene was like a kaleidoscope, reflecting various shades of red, purple, and orange, depending on the time of day and the angle of sunlight. But when we set foot on the hills themselves, the ground beneath us seemed to be eroding as fast as we could take a step. Indeed, according to the national park sign you read to us, this kind of sedimentary rock erodes an inch per year—compared to 1,000 years for most rocks.
This strikes me as an apt metaphor for Parenting Standard Time: The ground shifts under us the moment we get our feet planted.
***
So many things have surprised me about parenting in these nine years since you were born: the vacuuming frequency, the rate at which we go through bananas, how fast my body can move when you’re hurt. But one of the most consistent conundrums has been the passage of time. I know that technically a minute is always 60 seconds and there are always 24 hours in a day. But how is it that an hour when you were crying inconsolably as an infant felt like a week, and that week when our whole family had the flu felt like a month? Meanwhile, the year between eight and nine slipped through the hourglass like a handful of crumbly rocks.
According to another sign you read, the Badlands is the only national park where there are walkable sections without trails, where there’s open space to explore and create your own path. True, there are markers along the way, almost like a scavenger hunt. It occurs to me that parenting is a lot like walking in the Bandlands: There’s no road map for this.The scenery is ever-changing, shifting practically under our feet. But it’s beautiful in its very changeability. There’s a new vista at every turn.
And I’m trying to catch up, attempting to savor the mental snapshots as they come, fighting the longing for solid rock under my feet.
Now that you’re nine, I feel it more than ever, this tension of wanting to protect you and wanting to empower you. You are increasingly faster than I am, going places I can’t go. As the ground shifts beneath your feet and ours, Dad and I won’t be able to protect you from everything. We won’t be able to stop you from slipping every time. But we know the One who can. And we can do what’s in our power to equip you with wings so that when you stumble, you’ll fly instead of fall.
In the meantime, we’ll stock up on Band-Aids. (For all of us.)
So happy birthday, our halfway-to-a-grownup kid. The view from here may be shifting faster than the hills of South Dakota, but it sure is lovely.
We love you! Mom and Dad
I lift up my eyes to the mountains— where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth. He will not let your foot slip.
How is that you have been with us for half a decade? Or one whole hand, as you put it.
If I close my eyes, I can see that snuggly baby version of you (“Cheeks,” as your dad nicknamed you—for good reason). But when I tried to lift you up the other day, I was shocked by how solid you are. When was the last time I held you? I wondered. After having you in my arms for five years, that “last” went by without fanfare, without warning.
Yesterday you were talking about how some of your friends stay at preschool in the afternoon, and I asked if you wanted to do that too.
“Mom, you’d be too sad,” you said solemnly. “What would you do if I was gone all day?”
I smiled at your tender oblivion to my to-do list, but all at once my smile got caught somewhere in my esophagus. Because in the fall you will be gone all day. I might be more productive, but indeed, I’ll be a little sad too. I’ve been here before, standing at the cusp of kindergarten, and I know how this goes. Once you start “real school,” it’s like going from the bunny hill to the black diamond: straight down from here. While you’re zipping ahead, I’ll be behind you, snowplowing the whole way.
I love the person you’re becoming—the deep questions and silly ideas and bursts of empathy that bubble up from inside you. I wouldn’t trade in any of this big kid stuff. But I do miss the way your pudgy baby fingers used to squish my cheeks and the way you called your brother by a special tongue click (and later “Dam-dam”) and how you looked at us with an impish grin before jumping from any number of inadvisable heights.
***
You came home from school one day last week and matter-of-factly informed me that one of your best friends said she didn’t want to be friends with you anymore.
“How did that make you feel?” I asked, trying to be all neutral and Dr. Becky about it, despite the thundering of my own heart.
You flashed me that dimpled grin, shrugged, and said, “Oh, she didn’t mean it, Mom. We should invite her to my birthday party.”
***
You are growing up, is what I’m trying to say. And that makes me proud and happy and misty-eyed all at once. No, I’m not trying to rewind time, but I do kind of wonder where it all went.
I do know, though.
In these past five years, we went down slides at the park. We read books. We held hands. We pretended to be dogs. We sang silly songs in the car. We ate pancakes and drank hot chocolate brimming with marshmallows. We rode our bikes and applied hundreds of Band-Aids. We said bedtime prayers. We made up nonsense rhymes and spun far-fetched tales about lions. You told Dad and me “I love you” dozens of times a day. You turned somersaults in the living room and jumped off the couch and built forts and Lego creations and played with your brother.
You became yourself. You are still becoming yourself.
And we are so grateful God picked us to be in the front row, cheering you on.
It happens every year. The Queen Anne’s lace blooms—delicate yet sturdy, dainty yet wild—and I feel the pang of August. Summer is sunsetting. The heat index may still be one-hundred-and-sweaty degrees, but make no mistake: The days are getting shorter. The cicadas are humming their annual dirge. It’s time to dig out the backpacks from the back of the closet.
I’ve always been of the “do your homework before you play” mindset. This generally worked for me . . . when I had a finite to-do list.
But as a mom? It turns out, your homework is never finished.
***
We made a “Summer Adventures” list this year, as is our tradition. The goals were small but grand, especially if you’re four and seven:
Run through the sprinkler. Make root beer floats. Go hiking in the woods. Have a water balloon fight. Get a shaved ice. Try out that new playground. Have a breakfast picnic. Go on a road trip. Make s’mores.
We played and ate our way through the summer, delighting as we checked each item off our list. The days extended before us like a limitless shoreline.
Until we spotted the first heads of Queen Anne’s lace, bobbing obliviously in the field. Suddenly the air was full of back-to-school flurry: making lists and gathering supplies, reconfiguring schedules and resetting bedtimes. Summer was sprinting to a close, and when we looked at our list, we saw we had more adventures left than weekends.
And that’s how I found myself leaving work outrageously early on the last Monday of summer to check our last adventure off the list. We ate a picnic and let the watermelon juice run down our chins. We ran and climbed and scraped our knees. I made them pose for pictures (even though they insisted on silly ones) because by next summer, they won’t fit in those shoes/shirts/car seats anymore, to say nothing of the crook of my arm.
The Queen Anne’s lace disappears at first frost, after all.
I don’t know how to savor every minute. I do know that it’s unrealistic to successfully juggle every plate. Sometimes the best we can do is choose which ones to drop. And every once in while, the right thing to do on a Monday afternoon is play…even though you haven’t finished your homework yet.
When the grown-ups in your life see you lately, they regularly say some variation of, “Wow, you’ve grown so much!” And they’re right—but in more ways than just inches.
How do we measure your growth? How do we chart it?
Do we capture it by how many teeth you’ve lost, how many numbers you can add in your head? Is it how short your pants have gotten, how tight your shoes suddenly are (even though we got them at the start of summer)?
Do we measure it by the way you make up your own jokes, the way you say, “How has your week been?” to our elderly friend at church, the way you make your own lunch and fix a sandwich for your brother while you’re at it?
Years and inches are easier to chart than your ability to follow assembly instructions on my new desk chair or explain the difference between a leopard and a jaguar, or your intuition that our neighbor needs a note to cheer him up.
This independence is exactly what we’ve been working toward—it’s the goal, the endgame. But it still pierces us sometimes, this growing-up version of you.
Madeleine L’Engle once said, “I am still every age that I have been,” and I think that’s true of parenthood too: When your dad and I see you, you are still every age you have ever been.
We look into your big brown eyes, and we’re transported to the hospital room where we locked eyes with our “Baby Spark” for the first time. When we see the freckles that dot the tip of your nose every summer, we can’t help but recall the toddler who spent endless hours investigating bugs on the sidewalk. When we see you run with those increasingly grasshopper-like legs, we are taken back to the moment you took those first wobbly steps, more dance than forward motion. When you ask for a sixth pancake, we’re imagining feeding you sweet potatoes in your highchair, with a success rate hovering around 30 percent. We tuck you in at bedtime, your pillow surrounded by piles of library books, and suddenly we’re time-traveling to your toddler requests for Blue Hat, Green Hat and that little truck book with the handle. We watch you march into school without looking over your shoulder and recall you on that first day of preschool, so proud with your tiny blue backpack, holding my hand with a grip that defied your three years.
So maybe that’s why we can welcome these new stages, even as we miss the old ones: We never truly have to give away those other iterations of you. We hold them in our hearts now, and we will continue to hold them as you grow up. We love every version of you: baby-you, toddler-you, preschooler-you, and eight-year-old you. And the person God is making you to be that we haven’t met yet.
It’s one of those memeable sayings you can’t avoid this time of year: You only have 18 summers with them! Make sure this one counts!
I appreciate this sentiment, but it can feel like inspiration with a millstone around its neck. The reality is, every second of summer isn’t magical. Every second of summer can’t be magical.
Some moments of summer look less like fairy dust and twinkle lights and more like lists and laundry, dirty dishes and deadlines, bills and band-aids. Sometimes people are hot or cranky or bored or tired or hormonal or otherwise off their A-game. Even smack dab in the middle of those very moments we’ve worked so hard to make magical.
So for all the magic-makers out there, I’d like to propose a new equation. What if, instead of putting the pressure of an entire summer on our backs, we thought about it in terms of seizing golden moments within those summers?
We have 100,000 minutes this summer, and some 1.8 million minutes over the course of 18 summers. Every one of those minutes won’t be magical . . . but some will be.
Yes, we can be intentional about making plans and carving out space and putting down our devices and looking our loved ones in the eyes. But maybe we don’t need to sweat so much to make it all count or beat ourselves up when, despite our best efforts, everything goes off the rails.
Maybe the moments that will become magical in our memories won’t be the epic trips we take or the carefully orchestrated itineraries we create. Maybe it will be the popsicles we eat on the porch, the deep conversation that comes out of nowhere while we’re running an errand, the book from the library that strikes our mutual funny bone, the time we make a flour-dusted disaster in the kitchen.
Maybe we don’t have to work so hard to be the makers of magic; maybe we can become noticers of the magic that’s already right here. We don’t need to fear that the time we’re given won’t be enough. We can take the moments the same way we live them: one at a time—one of 1.8 million at a time.
And who knows, maybe this summer can feel less like scarcity and more like serendipity.
You hatched butterflies in preschool this spring. When I picked you up one sunny day in May, you were delighted to report that several of the butterflies had hatched.
“But where did the caterpillars go?” you asked.
We were so focused on the arrival of the butterflies that I guess we failed to prepare you for this seemingly obvious reality: The presence of the butterflies means the disappearance of the caterpillars.
As I tried to talk you through this, my words caught unexpectedly in my throat.
How can I blame you for wishing to keep both? My journey in motherhood thus far has been a lesson-on-repeat that I can’t hang on to two stages at once. Not only that, but I can neither speed up nor slow down this process of metamorphosis.
Hooray! You learned to walk! But I miss kissing your head now that you no longer ride, kangaroo-style, in your Baby Bjorn.
Hooray! You can go to sleep on your own! But I miss those hushed moments, rocking you in that hand-me-down glider chair.
Hooray! You learned how to make that tricky letter sound! But you no longer call your brother by that beloved lispy nickname.
As Augustine said, “Every change is a kind of death.”
As I watched you onstage at your preschool concert, doing the motions to the song with earnest concentration, I sense delight and wistfulness doing a tug-of-war in my heart. Each stage represents a new accomplishment, a new adventure, a new milestone. And I wouldn’t trade any of them in.
But let me tell you a secret, my preschool buddy: I love the butterflies. Still . . . I miss the caterpillars sometimes too.
Not long after Easter, we were eating dinner and you looked at me, mid-bite, suddenly serious.
“Is Jesus still alive?” you asked.
“Yeah, he is,” I replied.
“Me thinking . . . is him real?”
“Yes, he’s real.”
Your face broke into a grin. “I knew it!” And you returned to your pasta.
You seem content with that answer for now, but I’ve been thinking about our conversation ever since. What does it mean that Jesus is real? That he’s not like a unicorn or a dragon—a cool mythical being that we wish existed? Or that he’s not like a dinosaur, something that once walked the earth but is now a mere memory?
I don’t have the theology to grasp this fully myself, let alone explain it to someone who wears his shoes on the wrong feet. But maybe, if I’d had more presence of mind in that moment, I could have said something like this:
Yes, him is real. You may not be able to see him with your eyes. But you can see the daffodil he crafted, with its fluttery, buttery petals. You can see the sunset he stretched across the sky, with hues that would make your Crayola box jealous. You can see the ocean he formed, stretching so far it kisses the sky.
You may not be able to hear him with your ears. But if you get really quiet, you just might be able to hear his whispers in your heart: I love you. You are my beloved son. I am so glad you’re mine. I would choose you every time.
You may not be able to feel him with skin or hands or nerve endings. But when you’re scared or lonely, you just might feel the breeze on your face or the sun on your neck and wonder if there’s more to this world than mere atoms and molecules.
You may not be able to catch his scent directly, but one day you might get a whiff of peace you can’t explain. Or maybe, right when your life seems bland and you’re hungering for something deeper than you can name, you’ll get an unexpected taste of grace.
When these things happen, my son, I hope you still have the heart of a child. And I hope you say, like your four-year-old self, “Yes, him is real.”
My suitcase wasn’t even unpacked from my maternal grandmother’s funeral when I got the call about my dad’s mom: “Grandma has been in bed all week. We’re driving down tomorrow to say goodbye.”
I do realize the extravagance of this gift I’ve been given, having grandparents I’ve known into adulthood. I feel almost guilty grieving these losses, like someone in Hawaii complaining about the winter.
And yet grief is so rarely a rational animal. There is little comfort in comparing wounds, no balm in “at-leasting” them.At least I had her so long. At least she went peacefully. At least she’s no longer suffering. It may be true, but it does little to erase the loss.
Grandma celebrated her 102nd birthday this summer, but her mind remained as bright as ever. Whenever I visited, I perused the books on her end table: mysteries, historical fiction, chunky nonfiction titles. As I listened to her delineate the tactical strategies from her recent World War II read, I found myself shaking my head, hoping to be as well read when I grow up.
Books are, after all, how she and I became friends. I knew her as my grandma my whole life, of course, but with twelve children and a gaggle of grandchildren, she always had a lot of voices clamoring for her attention.
One summer when I was in junior high, we went to her and Grandpa’s condo to swim, and she noticed the copy of Anne of Green Gables under my arm. I told her about Anne, the book’s spunky red-haired heroine. Before long, I was passing along the entire series to her (and eventually to Grandpa too) when I finished each one. As we had our own informal book club over the course of eight books, I realized how much of Anne I saw in my grandma: both were gingers who had lost parents young and had come out resilient (and a little fiery) on the other side. Both were lovers of literature who got an education at a time when not many women did. Both took a legacy of loss and wrote a redemptive story for the generations after them.
Grandma’s story could have been a book itself. I think about the vignettes I’ve heard over the years—how she met Grandpa in college just before the war, how she waited and prayed for his return after he enlisted, how he mailed her a parachute so she could use the silk for her wedding dress, how they got married on a Tuesday right before Lent (so they wouldn’t have to wait until after Easter), how she and Grandpa had a dozen kids in 14 years, how she lived independently (and read independently) until past the century mark.
She didn’t see herself as a heroine, but then again, aren’t all the real heroes the ones who don’t realize it? “Oh, honey,” she’d tell me, “I just did what I had to do.” On every page, her life was marked by humility and grit.
But perhaps more than anything, she didn’t see herself as heroic because she knew she was part of a larger story. And she knew the Author who was writing it:
You saw me before I was born. Every day of my life was recorded in your book. Psalm 139:16
Grandma, your final chapter is over here on earth. But your story on the other side is just beginning. Only this time you get to read the book before I do.
You were never one to spoil an ending, but I’m pretty sure the story you’re living now in is the grandest one of all. In this story, there’s a happily ever after, but no “the end.”
I don’t know exactly what the literary scene looks like in heaven. But I’m putting in a special request to be in your book club just in case.
Hope . . . makes possible our ability to recognize that the world in which we find ourselves has a story; and if there’s a story, there’s a storyteller. Stanley Hauerwas
What I remember most about Grandma’s house is the way it smelled.
It smelled like pie and cookies and Christmas and memories and love.
Long before my family would begin the 2,000-mile trip across the country to Grandma and Grandpa’s house, Grandma would start preparing for us to come. Most of that work was done in a flour-dusted apron, with rolling pin in hand.
For weeks before we arrived, she rolled out pie crusts, baked bars, and stocked her five(!) freezers with all manner of chocolatey desserts, Scandinavian cookies, and cinnamon rolls (each tray wrapped with a rumpled sheet of thrice-used foil).
As soon as we stepped into her house, the number-one priority (after a round of hugs) was pie. No matter what time we arrived, even if we were bleary eyed, even if it was egad-o’clock in the morning, we would eat a slice of pie. Huckleberry pie, rhubarb pie, French apple pie—every bite made from scratch.
The next morning at Grandma’s house, my nose would wake up before the rest of me did. From my sleeping quarters with the cousins in the basement, I’d be welcomed into consciousness by the scent of homemade donuts.
Grandma wasn’t one to sit down for heart-to-heart conversations, and she didn’t have much time for lofty words or emotive speeches. She loved with her hands instead of her words.
I love you, she said with every mixer stroke. I love you, she said with every roll of her pie crust (including the leftover bits, which she’d sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon and give to us grandkids). I love you, she said as she preserved another jar of jam made from Grandpa’s fresh-grown raspberries. I love you, she said with every knead of cinnamon roll dough (which she unapologetically served with dinner and were not dessert).
***
I got the call about Grandma’s death on a sunny September morning. She was 96, and she hadn’t made cookies for some years now, so this wasn’t a surprise. But in that moment, decades of memories came flooding over me.
“What was your grandma like?” my boys ask me.
There are so many ways to answer that question. Do I tell them about the tenacious farm girl who loved to ride her horse, Dewey, instead of sew like her sister? Do I tell them about the brave young woman who left her parents’ farm in North Dakota to get a college degree in business at a time when most women were homemakers? Do I tell them about the young teacher who set off for a job in Montana, having never visited, because the people she’d met from there were nice? Do I tell them about the handsome chemistry teacher who saw her picture in the paper and volunteered to pick her up at the train station and how they were married for 66 years?
I open my mouth to respond, but none of the words taste right on my tongue.
“Come into the kitchen,” I say instead. “Let’s make a pie.”
We slice and mix and sprinkle and make a sugary mess before putting the pie in the oven. As the aroma of warm apples and cinnamon filters through the house, I whisper in their ears, “This is what Grandma’s love smells like.” And as we take a bite of buttery apples with strudel, I tell them, “This is what Grandma’s love tastes like.”
***
Don’t let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God, and trust also in me. There is more than enough room in my Father’s home. If this were not so, would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you? When everything is ready, I will come and get you, so that you will always be with me where I am. John 14:1-3
As I wash the pie tin (the one Grandma gave me), it occurs to me that Grandma is on the other side of the preparations now. The woman who prepared endlessly for meals and holidays and parties and visits from out-of-town grandchildren is now going to a place that has been prepared just for her. Her Savior has been at work, getting his home ready for her, stocking the heavenly freezer for her arrival.
I wouldn’t necessarily bank on this theology, but who knows? Maybe, just maybe, a slice of pie will be waiting for her when she gets there.
It was the best of days; it was the hottest of days…
To have a three-year-old is to be thrust into a yearlong summer—the kind with record-breaking heat waves and furious squalls.
You sweat and you play. You love it and you long for a reprieve. You’re convinced you’ll melt, and you don’t want it to end. You duck for cover when tornadic winds touch down. You eat too many popsicles on the front porch.
In this season of parenting a child with a hankering for autonomy and bursting with so. many. opinions., I feel the heat and intensity of these days.
The words of a Van Morrison song have been echoing through my mind the last couple of months:
These are the days of the endless summer…
These are the days indeed.
These are the days of sloppy whispers in my ear: “I wuv you, Mama.” And these are the days of “Me not like you anymore!” when I limit his daily banana quota.
These are the days of “revenge peeing” in the corner (the term so aptly coined by Daniel). And these are the days of being met by squeals and full-body hugs when we walk in the door.
These are the days of brothers sneaking into bed to read together in the morning. And these are the days when Duplos also function as tiny plastic missiles.
These are the days of cute phrases like “croco-gator” (crocodile + alligator) and “mus-beard” (mustache + beard). And these are the days of meltdowns over the wrong color cereal bowl.
Endless summer. Isn’t that the pinky promise summer makes with us? You realize it’s not true—you know it can’t last forever—but as you wipe ice cream from sticky faces, as mosquitoes feast on bare ankles and fireflies blink languidly in the dusk, you can almost be lulled into believing the calendar page will never turn.
But in these long days of August, I catch a whiff of the changing of seasons.
Will this be the last time I buy a box of overpriced diaper genie refill bags? Will this be the last time our boy dashes into our bed during a thunderstorm, thinking it’s bad guys? Will this be the last time I do an emergency potty cleanup in the grocery store? Will this be the last time I carry a sleep-heavy boy to his bed after a playground date?
“It goes by so fast,” they say. They’re right, of course. But I have no more power to slow down these years than I do to pause the sun in its descent or to delay the approach of autumn.
It seems so obvious, but it hit me like a gut punch today: This is the youngest my kids will ever be.
So what can I do, time-bound creature that I am? I suppose my only recourse is to savor the moments as I can and try to make a truce with the calendar. I’ll resist the longing to fast-forward or rewind or press pause. I’ll do my best to remember as many sweet things as I can, and just enough of the spicy bits to empathize with moms of other threenagers one day.
And maybe this afternoon, when the sun is beating down on us, we’ll sit on the porch and eat another popsicle.
