Remember When

For most of my life, I'd been in a losing, yet frantic, struggle to stop time. Always aware of the ticking of the clock, I feared how fast time screamed by. If I didn't do everything possible to live in the moment, it would evaporate before I had a chance to even see it. A favorite movie of mine is "Ferris Bueller's Day Off."  I loved his mantra: Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

Problem was, I kept stopping life so I could look around. And as anyone who has ever driven a car knows, you stop too often, you get nowhere.

So for as long as I can recall, I've battled the panic over life moving at life-speed, and my desire to call a time-out so I could thoroughly enjoy every minute.

You know what happened to kick this dilemma into a Stage 5 Terror Alert?

Becoming a parent.

It began with my pregnancy. Friends, family, strangers—anyone with a voice—would tell me to enjoy my sleep now, because I'd never sleep again. Or enjoy my husband now, because we'd never talk again until this child left the house at 18. Enjoy eating now, because I'll be on a diet forever to lose the baby fat. Enjoy today, because tomorrow is going to suck, essentially.

I made it my mission to adore being pregnant (which, thankfully, was easy, since my pregnancy was ridiculously blissful. Thank you, hormones!) and to hang on to these last pre-parenthood days with gusto. We traveled. We went on dates. We slept. We slept late. We had fun. But behind all of it lurked this panic planted by all those well-meaning congratulations and nuggets of advice I didn't ask for. I feared the unknown path of parenthood, so if I stopped and looked around long enough at my pre-motherhood life, I could hang on to as much of it as possible. Exhausting, yes.

But not nearly as utterly, destructively exhausting as what came next.

I had a baby. And the comments, guised in the cloak of assistance and female sisterhood, flooded in, drowning me. Every single time I went out in public with my daughter, strangers would talk about how awesome parenting is, how their babies are now 43 years old, how much they loved these newborn days, how much they miss having babies, how I MUST enjoy every minute. "Because they grow so fast! It'll be over before you know it. Just cherish every minute!" Every bit of conversation ended with this nugget. Or should I call it a hit, because every single time I heard it, I felt bruised and fearful. I felt like a horrid mother because, honestly, I found it difficult to enjoy parenting as much as these people said I should. And that just did wonders for my mommy self-esteem.

Newborns change so much from week to week, you could literally sit down and watch them transform before your eyes. As I witnessed my daughter go from red, curled-up, wrinkled newborn to creamy-skinned, bright-eyed baby, I quivered with anxiety. Everyone is right, I screamed. I am going to go to bed tonight and when I wake, my girl will be in high school. Just like that! And I missed it! I wasn't enjoying it enough!

Missing anything—even a good deal at Target—gives me hives. Missing out on moments of motherhood, well, that gave me certifiable insanity. I promptly launched a mission to capture every second of this new life, just as I did my pregnancy. Of course, as anyone with a newborn will tell you, there are lots of moments (hell, days and weeks of them) that are downright miserable. Why stop and look around here? Because I'll regret missing this, I screeched to myself. Because it all goes so fast! I must enjoy it all!

I took thousands of pictures, hours of video, wrote in dozens of journal pages all in the hopes of capturing time. The minute I'd feel bored stupid with parenthood, frustrated the girl wouldn't sleep, in tears because nursing was less appealing than shoving a stick up my nose, guilt overtook me. Maybe mothers knew something I didn't. Maybe I just wasn't cut out for motherhood because I did not enjoy it every minute of the day.

As days turned to months turned to years, I added another baby and more anxiety. Once one became two, time really did seem to go fast. And if I thought I was busy with one, I was sadly mistaken. Two wasn't overwhelming, but close to it at times.

Yet it was this turn on my life highway, when I was at my busiest, that I realized something: All of those well-meaning advice givers were full of crap.

Yes, life goes fast. Way, way too fast. And yes, we should enjoy parenthood instead of complain and gripe about it all of the time, wishing it away. But it's impossible to love it every single day.  I had a friend of mine once tell me in my pre-baby days that parenthood is a bit like marriage. Are you mindlessly, over-the-moon in love and joyful every single day? No. Would you trash it all and be single again? No way. Same with parenthood. Every day is not a fun-filled ride on "It's a Small World." Poopy diapers get ripped off and used as feces-filled paintbrushes. Babies scream for no other reason than they can. Boobs hurt. Faces wrinkle. Tinkling becomes a family affair. Days and nights get confused. Spit up smells worse when dry. Tantrums in the middle of Trader Joe's make you want to abandon the cart with kid inside and run away.

But you don't. You don't want to trade it all in because at the end of the (very long) day, you know you'd rather be their mom than anything else. Even if today sucked ass.

Author and blogger Gretchen Rubin said “The days are long, but the years are short.” The more years I log as a mom, the more I understand this completely. There are days that will not end. I used to count my days as work days and weekends. Now, I count them as the time between naps, meals and bedtimes. Some days, it feels like I spent years in the kitchen, making snacks and lunches and breakfasts. But when I picked my head up and finally looked around, it would be 10 p.m. and I had no idea. Wasn't it just breakfast? Motherhood really messes with your internal clock.

Having my two babies left me less time to obsess about my mission to live in the minute while consciously taking stock of said minute. In reality, that's impossible. But in my head, I thought it was a must-do.

But now, I think I figured it out. It's impossible to hold on to every minute without missing the next one coming down the road. Some moments are tough. Some are bittersweet. Others are beautiful. But I don't have to feel guilt anymore because I don't blissfully enjoy every single one of them. I can accept them for what they are, tuck them away and move on. 

Parenting expert Sandy McDaniel helped me out. She said that she spends a lot of her time now remembering when her children were younger, entering school, playing around during summer vacation.

"Your 'when' is now," she wrote in a recent newsletter. "You 'chill' too, and don't miss playtime without all the school schedules. Enjoy your children."

That was it! Not "enjoy every single minute." Not "this time goes so fast, hang on with a death-grip." Not "You'll regret it if you don't feel like Snow White with birds singing songs of joy around your head every day you wake up."

Enjoy your children. Your now will someday be your remember when. So enjoy your kids.

That, I can do. Even when they're screaming, or painting with poop, or not eating well, or biting me, or crawling on top of the bookshelf, or diving into the drama queen pool, or asking me for the 36^th time to play on the computer, or running through the library and screaming like a drunk "Jersey Shore" fool. I can hate the moment, feel frustration into my bone marrow, ache longingly to have a few uninterrupted hours of work time, want to scream and run away. But throughout it all, I always enjoy my babies. Maybe not the moment or the circumstance. But my kids. I can enjoy them. That, I can do. I can look at that moment, "click" a mental picture, file it away as a "remember when" and keep going. This will work with the crazy moments as well as the ones I want to hang on to forever. 

So the next time I get that snippet of advice from someone warning me how fast time goes by and how I'll regret it if I don't relish every moment, enjoying each one, I'll say, "I am enjoying my kids. This moment, on the other hand, sucks and I don't care if it speeds by. My kids, though, yeah, I'll enjoy them and I will probably turn this into one of those 'remember when' moments in about 10 years. This moment, with the toddler frantically grabbing on to me in his attempt to climb out of the cart as if it was the icy Bering Sea, and my daughter dissolving into tears because I snapped at her for ramming her child-sized shopping cart into my ankle for the ninth time. But right this very second, I’m fine with just enjoying having kids."

Of course I won't say any of that. I'll nod, chuckle knowingly and say "Oh don't I know it. Yes, I am enjoying every single second." Because that's what I'm supposed to say. But in my head, I'll answer the way I want. I will remind myself that while I don't enjoy the moment, I do enjoy my kids. I will remember this moment, love it or not. Guilt be gone.