Stephanie Rische

Blogger and Writer: Capturing Stories of God's Grace

Threenager Summer

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.

Photo by Daniel Rische

On Savoring

I hear it again today,
in the produce aisle this time.
“Savor every moment,” she says,
the smell of nostalgia
mingling with summer strawberries.

I know what she means.
But on this day
The overripeness stings my nose and
I can’t stop the sweat from
beading on all my fleshy parts.

This grocery list of All The Things
required to keep small people alive—
it’s like being served a giant chocolate cake
every single day.
Decadent, delicious . . . even enviable.

But how do you savor something
when there are five mouthfuls
stuffed in your cheeks at once?

How do you savor something
when you must consume every last bit,
even when you’re overfull?

My friend Sarah says,
she with the wise words and two steps ahead:
Savor one bite.
This bite.
The one on your fork right now.
You don’t have to savor them all at once.

So I grab a pint of strawberries
and reach deep
for a smile.

Maybe we’ll make strawberry shortcake
together.
And if some of the juicy ones end up
in the compost pile,
amen and so be it.
I will trust that even there,
they are not wasted.

A Letter to My Second-Born Son

Dear Milo,

Over the past half a year, you have somehow both enlarged me and made my world smaller.

In those first few months, amid a pandemic/social distancing and a winter with record-breaking snowfalls, our world was mostly a cozy four-person cocoon. In the middle of the night, when I fed you by the glow of the Christmas lights we strung on your ceiling, it could have been just you and me in the universe, if not for the snack your dad left for me beside the rocking chair.

Our world was small, yes. But you have also been showing me a grander view of the world.

When I see the man at the stoplight holding a tattered sign, my usually calloused heart is pierced. He was once a baby too, I think. He once had a mother who rocked him to sleep.

When I hear you laugh—without filter or self-consciousness—I can believe in breathtaking joy, the kind that blooms out of the soil of sorrow.

When I see your sense of wonder over the little things—bubbles catching the sunlight just so, a leaf dancing in the breeze—I am reminded to slow down, to bear witness to the miraculous right under my nose.

When I see you and your brother communicating with no need for words, I can embrace a world where reconciliation is possible, where hearts can be glued back together.

You have surprised me, little man . . . and humbled me too. I’ve had a baby before, I remember thinking. Better yet, I’ve had a baby boy. I probably know how to do this. But of course I don’t. Because I’ve never had you before.

You made it clear even before you were born, when the wild rumpus ensued in my belly, that you were your own little person. Ever since, you’ve been on the move, wiggling and kicking and grinning and generally charming your way through life. You refuse to be held on my hip, preferring to be face-out so you won’t miss a single thing.

As a one-toe-in-the-water kind of person myself, I marvel at the way you cannonball straight into the deep end. I admire your moxie, the way you embrace the world and everyone you meet with open arms and a full-body grin.

Just one year—that’s all the time we get you as a baby. I’m trying to drink in the joy of it this time around, knowing it’s like juice concentrate. So much to take in with a single sip, but there’s no way to water it down.

So halfy birthday, little guy. We can’t imagine the world without you; we can’t imagine our family without you. Please keep teaching us—we have a lot more to learn.

Love,
Mom

Idle and Blessed

I played hooky from work yesterday. It was one of those late-spring mornings that beckoned, all blue skies and sweet lilac air. The boys were crabby and craving attention, and I wasn’t making much headway on my deadlines anyway. So we grabbed hats and sunscreen and headed out for a hike on a trail near our home.

Our destination: a modest cave that doesn’t even warrant a name. At its entrance is a faded sign that reads simply, “Cave.” But for a three-year-old, it was magic.

Graham packed his little blue backpack with a flashlight and a snack. “Mama, do you think bears like fruit snacks?”

We explored the cave, barely big enough for a grown-up person to stand up in. To Graham’s simultaneous disappointment and relief, we didn’t find any bears. But along the way, we did see butterflies and bugs, ducks and dandelions, sticks and squirrels.

As we headed home, I thought about Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day”:

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?

Mary Oliver

As I looked in the rearview mirror at the boys nodding off in their car seats, it occurred to me:

Who better than a toddler to help me relearn how to pay attention?
Who better than a person under three feet to show me how to fall down into the grass?
Who better than a baby with leg rolls and a solitary cheek dimple to show me what it looks like to be idle and blessed?

Parenthood has revealed to me that everything does indeed die at last, and too soon—the baby’s propensity to giggle uproariously before the tickle even lands, the look of milk-drunk bliss on his face after he eats, the way he rests his right hand under his head when he sleeps. The toddler’s ability to create a world where Toy Story characters pretend to be lions who also happen to be fighting a fire; the way he tells Milo daily, “I love you so much, little bwother. I’m going to keep you.”

And it hits me: We will never have a summer when they’re three-and-a-half and six-months-old again. We have this one wild and precious summer. What is it we plan to do with it?

If there’s a common refrain to the parenting advice I hear, it’s this: Enjoy it, because it goes fast. I’m always left a little stymied by these words. Because when you have little people in your life, the momentum is always pulsing forward. There’s no pausing, no slowing down, no going back. How do you stop a speeding locomotive whose brakes have been disabled? How do you hold back a cascading waterfall with your bare hands?

I don’t know how to slow time down. I only know how to slow myself down.

And so this summer we will go on hikes in the woods. We will shine our flashlights into caves like the mighty bear hunters we are. We will flagrantly disregard our phones, our deadlines, our dirty toilets, our drive for productivity, our tyrannical to-do lists. We will kneel in the grass. We will collect sticks. We will look for butterflies. We will fail. And we will find the grace to try again.

So if you are looking for me on a summer day, you just may find me strolling through a field, a child in each arm.

Won’t you join me?

***

Work is not always required. . . . There is such a thing as sacred idleness, the cultivation of which is now fearfully neglected.

George MacDonald

Unlearning My To-Do List

It turns out that a person doesn’t necessarily need to be able to speak coherent sentences to be an effective tutor. Case in point: the pint-sized spit-up machine who is currently teaching me that sometimes being is better than doing.

I am a planner by nature. I like to make lists and, even better, cross things out. I enjoy the anticipation of thinking ahead…dreaming and scheming for tomorrow or next week or next month.

But when your schedule revolves around a twelve-pound person who can’t think about the future beyond I’m hungry, I’m sleepy, or I’m poopy, planning ceases to be very effective. You don’t know if the baby will nap (or for how long). You don’t know if he’ll wake up smiley or moody or you’d-better-hold-me-or-I-will-scream-like-a-banshee.

And so my tutor reminds me that sometimes we need to set the to-do list aside. Perhaps that’s one of the things children know that we grown-ups have forgotten: we can’t live in the future. We have only been given today. Children (and those with childlike hearts) have a way of inviting us—practically daring us—into the sacred now.

My little guy wordlessly tells me what God has been trying to say to me all along: that while there’s merit to hard work, it doesn’t define me. My worth isn’t predicated on my productivity. My identity isn’t determined by the number of things I crossed off (or didn’t cross off) my to-do list.

In the quiet hours of the night, after my little one is full and content, I sometimes hold him for an extra moment before stumbling back to bed. I marvel at the way he nestles perfectly into me, with his head tucked under my chin and his limbs curled up against me. I’m all too aware, the second time around this parenting rodeo, that he won’t fit there for long. I’ll blink and his arms and legs won’t fit on my lap. I’ll turn my head for a moment and he will be much too sophisticated to snuggle with his mama.

And so I try to soak in the moments as they come. Not every moment, because heaven knows it’s only possible to savor things one drop at a time, not when they come in a virtual tsunami. But I will try to seize the little moments—a dimpled smile, a tiny sigh, a contented gurgle—and freeze-frame them in my heart.

So maybe we don’t need to throw out the to-do list altogether. But perhaps we’d be better off if we could lose track of it for a bit. If we could look into the eyes of the person we’re with and be all there. In the sacred now.

I have calmed and quieted myself, like a weaned child who no longer cries for its mother’s milk. Yes, like a weaned child is my soul within me.

Psalm 131:2