The gift of thievery

I've heard folks say "time is a thief." I'm the closest I've ever been to understanding that fully. My son turned 14 last weekend - my only baby.

I won't make the cliché claims that I, myself, am only 21 and the math is impossible. No...that goes against the whole idea of this blog. I've actually never felt the need to pretend to be younger than I am, or to obscure the number of revolutions I've made around the sun. Each trip has taught me something and for the most part, I've enjoyed the them. I've earned every one of these gray hairs, and I LOVE the way they look....the wrinkles? Well, that's a different story, but I'm working on loving those, too.

Rather, when I think back over the last 14 years, I remember the feeling that washed over me when he arrived. It wasn't love at first. It was the weight of knowing he was mine to steward, to teach, to support, to protect. Now that I think about it...maybe that was love. It wasn't the infatuation that you hear some moms talk about. It was flat out fear that I couldn't measure up. That I didn't know how to do what I knew would amount to the more serious, important and difficult thing I'd ever do in my life - raise a good human being.

Between that moment and now, though, exists a time anomaly I've heard experienced parents reference in encouragement and warning to young, frustrated, sleep deprived parents: "The days are long, but the years are short." Conceptually, it's easy to get. Those nights when you're up every hour with a child who's hit a growth spurt, or when those molars are coming in and there will be no sleep for anyone in the house unless the child is being held nonstop. Or the endless power struggles and fighting over bed time and meal time, then home work and chores and house rules. Those days can feel interminable.

Still, around milestones, especially birthdays, there's a sense of, "what happened to my baby?" All that tiredness, frustration, unrelenting playing and cleaning and diapering....all those long days contract into themselves, creating a mosaic of a life in the making from a longer perspective. Those years are so short because we're in the flow state as parents. We're doing something much more important than simply feeding and keeping the child alive. We're building the foundation on which we hope these teeny humans make a joyous, messy, wonderful life. We're calibrating how hard we need to push to make them self-sufficient, with how much we need to nurture to keep them feeling safe and loved. We're balancing the knowledge that difficulty builds character, and that the world will throw enough difficulty their way.

Maybe it's like the doplar effect - like the moments before us feel longer than those behind us? Maybe it's just perspective. Maybe it's our own attention span and how much we have to balance that seems to rob the time we have with the smallest versions of our children. Or maybe in the moments when we notice their slowly elongating face as new freckles, or that their voice has pitched down just slightly more, it still contains enough of that once-cherubic little voice that it transports us to a different world than the one we now live in. A world we know we once ruled, and one that we can never visit again. That definitiveness brings distance.

And yet, as I sit here in a nosey lobby while my 14-year-old and his friends make the most of their two hours in the trampoline park, it's not theft I feel. To date, I've had 14 amazing years watching this creature who's part me, part Mr. Middle Life grow into his own version of a real human who is equal measures my chaos and Mr. Middle Life's order. And the gift of being his mother, witnessing each amazing iteration of the human is becoming is something time can never steal. In fact, I'm grateful for all the gifts whatever time I have left with him has in store for me.