Jake’s little sister arrived on Friday, proving that Friday the 13th isn’t so very unlucky after all. *** Jake arrived home with his sitter on Saturday evening to give Mike and me both big hugs. “Baby Lily,” he said sagely when he saw her sleeping in her moses basket. “That’s my sister.”
I wrote those words exactly five years ago.
Beautiful. I had forgotten about Jake’s first words to his sister. My heart is wrapped around them right now, both because they are such a sweet reminder of who he was at two and how is still like that now, and also because they are so true. He is still proud to be Lily’s brother, and they are both so happy being with each other.
But I’m not sure my heart was so sweetly wrapped around the moment at the time because I also wrote this in the same post:
And then I panic over the passage of time generally and how my children will grow up and how I will very much want them to grow up at many stages — teething, anyone? four months old and needing stimulation but unable to sit up, grab anything, or otherwise be stimulated without the help of a very bored, frazzled, guilty-feeling mother? — and how I will feel terrible for wanting them to grow up at the same time.
And I panic because I know there will be more difficult times ahead. And I panic because I know there will be happy, beautiful times that I will miss when they are gone. And I panic because I will one day not have chidren any longer, and I panic because for a long, long, long time I will have children and will have to calibrate the rest of my life for that.
Nothing has changed so much in five years, and at the same time everything has. Maybe because I have less time to sit around panicking.
But also because Lily is no longer a baby. It’s true that she hasn’t been one in some time, what with talking like a fifteen-year-old and making me laugh like one of my peers. Sure, she still wears pink most every day and loves anything princess or fairy-related and insists on being pushed to pre-K in her stroller in the morning wrapped up in a lap duvet like a little breakfast burrito.
But somewhere along the way, in spite of all her small person ways, she stopped being a baby. She started dressing dolls by herself, writing long loops of scribbles in her princess notebook with a ballpoint pen while poised at the old-fashioned desk in the corner of the living room. She shed that precious baby look. She’s suddenly a short, alabaster-skinned, little person with a high-pitched voice. It’s hard to describe the difference, but the difference is palpable.
I look back on the days when Jake was in pre-K and I’d ask the other mom with the toddler younger sibling, “When do they stop being so toddler cute?” Because the pre-K girls were cute and all, but not in the stiff-legged walking, baby-doll faced, can’t-take-my-eyes-off-her cuteness of their little sisters. They were, instead, long-limbed, tangled-haired, loud and active creatures who moved much too quickly and weren’t squishy and soft when you picked them up.
For much of Lily’s pre-K year I marveled at how she hadn’t really crossed that line. Until, suddenly, I noticed that she had.
Which, honestly, surprisingly, doesn’t make me sad. We’re caught up in the excitement of kindergarten approaching, another kind of littleness. I’m enjoying watching her actually dance in ballet instead of acting like a bunny rabbit, cute as that was. I enjoy her company, her opinions, her full body hugs that she promises me will never go away because she’s never been a teenager and she doesn’t know that, for a time, they almost certainly will.
In short, I’m not feeling as melancholy as I think I should.
The bone-deep desire to hold my infant comes only in short, electric jolts, gone before I can throw away the birth control. I can stare endlessly at the picture of three-month-old Lily chilling at the Billy Jonas concert, but not without vaguely recalling the relief I felt at having her asleep at that moment. I smile at the smaller preschoolers playing on her old playground and I feel just as satisfied to know she’s playing on the pre-K one.
It’s a rare moment in our fast-forward lives to feel just right in a place that is constantly changing.
Many practicing yogis call it “being in the moment.” Buddhists often call it “mindfulness.” Thich Nhat Hanh says “The present moment is filled with joy and happiness. If you are attentive, you will see it.” (Peace is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life, p. 21)
It’s what I was looking for when I started this blog—mindfulness in motherhood.
And now, after over seven years of motherhood and six years of blogging about it, and well over a decade of practicing yoga, I finally get it. It’s not about searching for mindfulness in motherhood. It’s about how motherhood has taught me mindfulness.
Who, after all, wants to miss a single moment of the joy and happiness that clings to our children if only we take a moment to be attentive to it?
So, my beautiful, fabulous-five-year-old Lily, happy birthday to you. And happy birth day to me as well.
YogaMamaMe 