Isn't it funny

 Isn't it funny....

...that while you're in the midst of raising your family, fully entrenched, stepping on lego pieces in the dark; tiny, bony knees and elbows in your back as you cling to the edge of your bed praying that you can get back to sleep despite zero real estate on your king sized mattress; using the inside of your sweatshirt to catch a particularly wet sneeze as it exits your little cherub's nose in the middle of a concert/gallery/church service/story time at the library; reading yet another note home from school that 'head lice was found on one of your child's classmates'; reaching under your car seat to retrieve your sunglasses, your hand lands on something decidedly organic and smooshy; and  the list goes on....

...isn't it funny that at these moments when you sigh deeply, and maybe even utter a curse or two under your breath about 'no more nice things' or 'never again a sense of adult autonomy' and wonder whether your delightfully oblivious offspring will ever learn how to become part of civilized society, you have absolutely no time to realize that in two or three short blinks, in less than the time it takes to match all the mismatched and missing socks in your 'odd sock basket' these little heathens will be graduating from high school, through college and off on their own adventures. The legos are handed down, or boxed up in the basement in hopeful anticipation of grandchildren. Your mattress space opens up, with ample room to stretch out (any remaining family pets notwithstanding). The kleenex boxes and paper towels sit largely untouched, as you take them off your weekly shopping list, and the car, once cleaned out, the stickers scraped off the inside of the windows and molten crayons pried out of cupholders, stays clean(ish).

I am not trying to wax philosophical about 'how fast they grow up'. I am simply remarking on how in hindsight, as I think back over the years of being a mother to young children, and then not so young children, I didn't even consider the other side. Countless days, nights, sicknesses, summer breaks, snow days, long weekends merge into a perceived endless block of meal prep, housework, sleeplessness, movie nights, stroller pushing, laundry and head lice infestations.

Sure, people would smile and chuckle at us at the grocery store, at airports, movie theatres and restaurants, and just as we were about to abandon them en masse, they would say "enjoy them! It goes SO fast!". Oh ok, we would sigh, and usher them ahead of us into the plane, train, restaurant booth or movie theatre. 

When you're in the thick of it, the future, the time beyond is unimaginable, somehow unfathomable. 

And now, going through pictures from those years, looking at the small faces, the goofy toothless smiles and bed heads, the spaghetti sauce smeared cheeks and blurry upside-down bodies seemingly perpetually tumbling through their world, I struggle to recall the feeling from back then. I know we did the things in the photographs, I remember the beach vacations, backyard picnics and the mountain top hikes,  I know the holidays happened, and I can certainly remember all the crazed preparations, but I cannot for the life of me conjure the mood, the ambiance, the way it was. Recalling the memories from this intense period of my life sometimes feels like picking up a handful of warm, dry sand off the beach. I hold them for a moment and they slowly run through my fingers and rejoin the rest of the pile, settling in among the rest, among what I can see and know as real, but can no longer quite define. It is the same as remembering a dream first thing in the morning; even as you're telling someone about the dream, you are losing the thread, and it becomes blurry and vague. Scenes running together and becoming one. 

When you've come through it looking back, it becomes intangible, also unfathomable.

Overall, I can honestly say that the years of hardcore parenting, the birth to 16 or thereabouts, were set apart from the rest of my life, the before and after, as an inexplicably special and densely jam-packed time of complete laser focus. Just as the past, before children, falls away into irrelevant oblivion the moment I set eyes on Dominic, my first born, so the future, the time after kids is equally distant, unfathomable. Pondering what lies outside of the here and now is futile and to be honest it felt fake. The job of raising young humans is so all encompassing, alongside whatever else your life brings you in terms of work, career, home, extended family etc, that it is only fair that we allow ourselves the pleasure and grace of living entirely in the here and now. Tunnel vision at it's finest and arguably most justified. Take your eye off the proverbial ball for a few years, and let the weeks, months and years unfold in their own time. Take walks, snuggle endlessly, bake cookies and don't clean your kitchen right away, read stacks of books together, eat cereal or toast for dinner, wrestle on the clean laundry pile instead of putting away the clothes. The rest will keep.  

So there it is, life, memories, parenting; everything boiled down to a sort of long rambling cliché. But these are my words and I wanted to get them down while I was feeling inspired!