“It’s not even a blink,” she says as we watch our daughters play in the front yard of her house.
I’ve dropped by to pick something up and she, a mother with one daughter beyond college and one who’s eleven, tells me because she’s been there herself.
“After this they’re women. You know that, right?”
I look over at them: they are already looking like women and acting like them at times too. Eleven is still child, but it is also stretching toward adolescence and adulthood at an alarming rate.
I sigh. A big one. “I know. I mean, I can guess.” I tell her.
The girls run in the yard and around the big tree that shades the front of their house. It’s almost summer and the sun is still high at 5pm.
“And then they’re off.” She’s thinking of her older daughter, I know. “And all we have are the memories of the little girls.”
She smiles. And I’m a little sad as I pack my kids back into the minivan. We have to stop at the market before we go back home so we do.
And maybe this is why I’ll write a little less this summer.
Maybe this is why I’ll hang out on Facebook and Twitter a little less this summer.
Maybe this is why I’ll say “no” to the speaking engagement and the conference this summer.
Because I want to enjoy them. I want to burn these days into my mama-memory. Because she’s right. It all changes {and I’m hoping that in the change and in the journey —- even in the struggle— it will be good} and it is quicker than a blink.
I’ll throw the ball in the yard and cuddle with a pajama-clad seven-year-old on the sofa without my phone. And I’ll jump in the pool even when I don’t want to get my hair wet — because I want to be the mom they remember swimming with and Marco-Polo-ing with rather than the mom tapping away at a keyboard while they frolic.
And hopefully we’ll remember the summer of eleven-and-a-half and seven-and-a-half with fondness.
What’s changing in your life right now? In your family?
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