Ends and Beginnings.

It was gray and rainy as the night turned into day.  I had come down early this morning to meditate and I heard little footsteps come down shortly afterwards. My third-born seven-year-old son snuggled right into my lap and his still-warm toes cuddled under the blanket right into the nooks and crannies behind my knees and under my legs. He let out a long, quiet, not-fully-awake sigh and his breath soon settled back into the rhythmic lull of sleep. His head rested directly on my heart. We sat like this for about twenty minutes, before I needed to rouse him again to start his day in earnest. 

My second-born ten-year-old son recently was injured in a basketball game. That same night we got X-rays and we eventually came home with a full cast up to his elbow, enclosing his three fingers: middle, ring and pinky. He was told by the doctor, for the next few weeks, to take tubs instead of showers and even though we were to cover the cast, it’s best just to be cautious. I am now, nightly, bent over the tub washing and rinsing his thick mop of hair, an act I thought was in our long past. 

Did you ever read that beautiful and heart-wrenching article about the lasts we all have with our children?  The one that talks about the silent whisper of things that were always familiar in the early stages of parenthood…. the clip of your little one’s seatbelt, washing your child’s hair, having your baby sleep on your chest, having their tiny hand reach for yours as you cross the street, calling you mama… and how they slowly, finally, one day, cease to exist…and often you really don’t know that *that one* was the very last one you would ever experience in your entire life?  

Those words and that concept absolutely gutted me. For the weeks that followed after reading that article, I became laser focused on all the regular daily tasks that filled my days… filling bathtubs, changing diapers, cooking dinner with a baby in my ergo or a toddler on my hip, reading bedtime stories, strapping kids into 5 point harnesses, diaper bags full of wipes and snack traps, strollers that had become like an appendage to my life…

Even though that version of my normal was only just a few years ago, typing those words today feels like I’m writing about a different person entirely.  Life is so different now. Already. Our four kids are now between the ages of nearly-five and twelve. They mostly shower now. No one needs me so much at dinner hour that they require a snuggle (now, it’s more like asks for homework help or frantic requests for aid in finding their mouthguard for lacrosse or goggles for swim before practice, or to solve sibling disputes).   And I know too, one day, it will be altogether different from now. 

But sometimes… sometimes… the universe sprinkles a little bit of magic and you are gifted with these moments once again. These small, seemingly insignificant, glorious, quiet, soul-affirming moments.  Almost like they are dropped from the heavens, when you are least expecting them.  And they whisper in and then they whisper out.  Sometimes you may have even been so busy that you hadn’t noticed that they had stopped happening in the first place let alone realize that there was a high likelihood that they would never occur again in your life, ever. 

It became too anxiety-provoking to note and commemorate each and every potential last. That hurt my heart too much. These two little pockets of perfection, though, they woke me right up.  We do need to take pause in our days. To look around.  There are beginnings and endings happening every day and every week with our littles as they bloom into becoming bigs. How special it is amidst the daily dose of delirium that is motherhood, to acknowledge these moments with enough clarity to see that they are there. Not every moment in life is swoon worthy, certainly, but when those moments do hit… take a long, slow breath, to capture the scents, the sounds, the sights, the swells of your heart. And then, at last, exhale, that much fuller for it. These moments don’t always come…but do be on the lookout for them. And if they do? Be there, all in, and appreciate them for what they are…little gifts from the universe.