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.
In the manual of things my children have taught me, one of thickest chapters is about the gift of slowing down. Mind you, I haven’t always seen this as a gift, especially when there are realities like clocks and deadlines and tardies and hard stops. Since becoming a mom, I’m slower than I used to be. But to my surprise, this has an unexpected upside. Turns out, there’s a lot more to notice in a lower gear.
As Barbara Brown Taylor says, “The child has only recently learned how to walk, so she still knows how.” My kids know things I need to relearn, like how to spot a roly-poly on the sidewalk or how to hear the hum of an airplane overhead. When I’m rushing from A to B, or when my mind is borrowing trouble from the past or the future, I tend to miss the beauty right under my nose.
There are a lot of possibilities when it comes to slowing down, but for me, one of the surefire ways is to be literal about it: to choose a slower mode of transportation.
When we’re riding our bikes instead of driving, we notice the flash of fuchsia flowers tucked among the dandelions.
When we’re walking instead of getting around on wheels, we see our neighbors on their front porch and stop to say hello.
When we’re reading on a blanket on a sunny afternoon instead of going places, we leave enough space for a white butterfly to land beside us.
It’s true that technology can make us more efficient. It can get us there faster and without breaking a sweat. But no chatbot has the heart required to write a love letter. No blue glow can take the place of a field of lightning bugs on an August evening. A phone can’t hold your hand while you look for the Big Dipper.
I am grateful for the added margin technology can create in our lives. But what will we miss out on if we erase the struggle altogether? What will happen to our souls if we outsource the ability to create? What will atrophy inside us if we lose the ability to wonder? If not us, who will stand amazed under a starlit sky?How will we hear the still, small voice of God if we always have earbuds in?
Today, I resolve to be bored. To not know. To daydream. To find shapes in the clouds. To embrace mystery. To be blissfully inefficient.
And when I’m tempted to say things like “Hurry up,” may I instead say, “Thank you.”
Above all, trust in the slow work of God. Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
I glance at the outsized news headlines as I go about the small tasks of my day.
Bombs are being dropped 6,000 miles away.
I hear a skirmish in the playroom and try to negotiate a peace treaty over Lego territory.
Another city is filled with tear gas and bullets.
We gather the neighbor kids for an impromptu art class, painting on big pieces of paper (and hands and faces).
Wildfires are burning, clogging the air with smoke even thousands of miles away.
We dig in the dirt at the home of an elderly friend, planting geraniums.
An act of violence has claimed more innocent victims.
I whisper a prayer, trying to string words together but ultimately dissolving into “Lord, have mercy.”
Does any of it matter? I wonder.
When the world is on fire, how can one small life make a difference? Do these unremarkable acts even matter?
When the world is on fire, does it make any sense to paint or plant or create or nurture or make peace or pray?
Then again, maybe fires aren’t put out in one big, heroic moment. Maybe flames can be doused with small buckets carried by many ordinary hands. By people who stubbornly continue to choose life and beauty and goodness and kindness in the face of darkness and mayhem.
Maybe the best we can do is choose a small act of life each day.
Say “I’m sorry.”
Forgive someone.
Speak the truth in love.
Plant a garden.
Create something.
Mail a card.
Breathe out a prayer.
Do it even if the world is on fire. Do it especially if the world is on fire.
If you ever took truly to heart the ultimate goodness and joy of things, even at their bleakest, the need to praise someone or something for it would be so great that you might even have to go out and speak of it to the birds of the air. Frederick Buechner, The Sacred Journey
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.
For my birthday this year, I had one request: to go on a fall hike as a family. I wanted to walk until the buzz of world events, work deadlines, laundry, and homework packets faded, replaced by chirpy crickets, crunchy leaves, and scampering squirrels.
The thing about slowing down, though, is that it doesn’t happen automatically, particularly once you’ve clocked several decades around the sun.
Daniel and I had a route planned out for our hike—and a pace that accompanied it. Our boys had other ideas. “Let’s find a four-leaf clover!” they said, plopping down in the middle of the trail.
I have never found a four-leaf clover myself. I’m not sure there’s an art to it as much as there’s a pace to it. It’s hard to find one at the pace of a car, for example, and it’s equally hard to find one when you’re going at the pace of running-a-few-minutes-late or the pace of too-little-margin.
I’m no horticulturalist, but I have a hunch the conditions for finding a four-leaf clover have less to do with weather or longitude or precipitation and more to do with how fast you’re moving. Maybe the secret is to slow down, to sit down, to let the sun rays kiss your shoulder. And maybe it’s not so much about luck as time. As my kids are teaching me, the only way to accept the gift of time is to downshift my speed. Otherwise, I just might walk past (or step on) the very thing I’m looking for.
I tried to temper my boys’ expectations, wanting to shield them from disappointment. But sure enough, after some unmeasured minutes of sitting smack dab in the middle of the trail, our eight-year-old found a tiny four-leaf wonder—a treasure for his treasure box.
I experienced a wonder that day too—a glimpse into the “unforced rhythms of grace,” as Eugene Peterson puts it. The treasure I brought home was less tangible but no less real. It was the smile that radiated from my boy’s face like the October sun.
Teach the children. We don’t matter so much, but the children do. Show them daisies and the pale hepatica. Teach them the taste of sassafras and wintergreen . . . head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this green space they live in, its sticks and leaves and the silent, beautiful blossoms. Attention is the beginning of devotion.
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.
When Daniel and I moved into our neighborhood a decade ago, we were the youngest by far. Almost everyone else had raised their children already, and the nests around us were empty. The neighbors referred to us, endearingly, as “the kids.” We were grateful, since they had all sorts of grown-up supplies and experience, lending tools and advice, giving us tomatoes from their garden, and dropping off meals after we brought our babies home from the hospital.
But I confess that in those early years, I assumed the age gap meant we wouldn’t have neighbor-friends. My imagination was too small to picture the intergenerational friendships that can bloom like a patch of wildflowers on an otherwise unassuming block.
***
We met Judy the way we’ve met most of our neighbors: by trespassing onto her property. One of our kids went traipsing into her yard for some reason I no longer recall—to pick a dandelion or to say hello to her dog or because their bike veered off course. In the weeks after that initial meeting, we exchanged hellos on our way home from school or on our evening walks (an attempt to burn off extra boy-energy before bedtime).
We found out Judy had been a widow for almost two decades. She didn’t have children or grandchildren, and her only family lived in Florida. It was just her and Daisy, her faithful fluffy companion. Now that she was in her 80s, the house was a lot for her to take care of, but she couldn’t bear the thought of leaving her home and neighborhood.
On Halloween that year, we went trick-or-treating at her house, and Daisy didn’t greet us with the usual tail-wagging. “She’s refusing to eat,” Judy told us, eyes filling. Then she whispered, so quietly I almost missed it, “What will I do without her?”
After that, we stopped by her house regularly to check on Daisy. And Judy made sure her candy dish was full for her two young visitors.
That Christmas, we brought cookies to Judy’s house. It was ambitious, perhaps even ill-advised, to bundle up a toddler and a baby on a day with a winter weather advisory and a wind chill deep in the negatives. But, insulated by our snow suits and our Christmas spirit, we trekked down the block and around the corner.
The good news was that Judy’s sister was there. The bad news was that Judy had fallen and needed to go to her sister’s house in Florida to recover. “I’ll be back in a few weeks,” she told us.
***
A few weeks turned into a few months. We texted Judy pictures of the daffodils growing in her garden. She sent the boys Easter cards. “I’ll be home by summer,” she said.
Summer came, and Daniel and the boys picked up sticks that had fallen down in her yard. That’s when we met Joe and Linda, who lived next door to Judy’s house. We found out they’d been quietly taking care of problems that cropped up, as problems do in vacant houses. We sent Judy pictures of the roses behind her house; she sent us Fourth of July cards.
The leaves turned, and we sent pictures of the red maple in her front yard. She sent the boys Halloween cards. “I’ll be home by Christmas,” she said. This time she signed them “Grandma Judy.”
Winter came, and we shoveled her driveway, even though no one would be driving on it. She let us know that she had to put her beloved Daisy down. She sent the boys a Christmas card with a puppy on the front.
***
Then Judy’s brother-in-law (who was also her ride back from Florida) passed away. “I’ll find a way to get home,” she promised.
On a walk one day, shortly after a thunderstorm, we noticed that Judy’s welcome mat had split in two.
“Mom, we have to get a new one!” one of the boys cried. “What if she comes home and sees it’s broken?”
I opened my mouth to say that Judy probably wouldn’t be coming home. Several years had passed since she’d left for Florida, and health and age were not on her side. But when I looked into my sons’ eyes, I couldn’t squash the hope I saw there.
And so we went to the store and picked out a welcome mat that matched Judy’s style. The boys proudly carried it from our house to hers, an act of hopeful defiance that she’d cross the threshold again one day.
***
On a hot July afternoon, we were sitting on the porch when Joe and Linda stopped by. Their eyes were wet, and I knew before they opened their mouths what they were going to say. “Judy got pneumonia last week,” they said. “She went into hospice, and she was gone two days later.”
My preschooler buried his head in my shoulder. He was just a baby when she left. I marvel to think that we were in-person friends for just a few months, but our time as pen pals lasted four years. And somehow, in that serendipitous way that happens sometimes, we had a friendship that transcended calendar-time.
***
We’re expecting a For Sale sign in front of Judy’s house any day. I don’t know who will move in—maybe they’ll be young, maybe we’ll call them “the kids.” I may be tempted to think we won’t have anything in common, that we probably won’t be friends.
But with Judy’s legacy fresh in my heart, I’ll try to remember that friendship can be less about age or life stage and more about geography.
So if you see a bud of friendship cropping up near your home, even if it’s in a spot you wouldn’t expect it, don’t be afraid to give it a little water. Something beautiful just might start blooming, right around the corner.
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.
