While so many of my students returned from Spring Break feeling rejuvenated from two weeks vacationing in such places as Florida, California, and St. Barts, I returned feeling thoroughly exhausted after staycationing in Michigan. I had grand plans to not only enjoy adventures with the littles and keep up with the regular chores, but to also organize outgrown baby clothes, put away winter outerwear, sort through The Piles that grow and fester on the work surfaces, and perhaps even fit in a massage or solo visit to the local café. Experienced parents out there, I can see and hear you shaking your heads and sympathetically chuckling at my lofty aspirations because you KNOW, don’t you?
You can picture me dashing to the basement to load laundry into the washing machine in a free moment, and then pausing to listen in resigned horror to the sound of urine splashing onto the downstairs bathroom floor because a little someone left it just a fraction of a second too late to try getting to the toilet. You can picture me scrambling to put together a vaguely healthy lunch for two of the littles while the third one (who only cries when hungry) wiggles and wails on his play mat. You can picture me pausing to grab microwavable macaroni and cheese on my next shopping excursion because sometimes sticking a cardboard pot in the microwave is a necessity. You can picture me zipping down another aisle to thrust a few jars of baby food into the shopping cart because, really, who was I kidding when I thought I\’d MAKE all of the baby food this time around? At least I\’m at Whole Foods. You can picture me grabbing the aforementioned mac \’n cheese and baby food jar in relief a few days later when everyone\’s hungry (and, by-the-way, it turns out that the microwavable mac \’n cheese is pretty damn good when you\’re one of those hungry ones). You can picture me suggesting not-so-calmly that the middle little extracts his uneaten mac ‘n cheese from the garbage when he whines that he’s hungry thirty minutes after declaring he’d had enough lunch. You can picture the oldest getting teary-eyed and shouting at me that I don’t care about his health or his brain or his brother\’s because I’ve told said brother to eat from the garbage.
You can picture it all because you’ve been there and, I have to remind myself, you’ve emerged (mostly) unscathed. Somehow, you probably look back on such scenes with a certain fondness, proud of yourself for making it through and raising little people into pretty decent grown up people. I\’m now one week post-spring break and feeling a bit of that myself. For while there were moments that drove me to tears (two occasions, to be precise), there were plenty of good ones, too. And there were two little boys who didn\’t want my spring break to end, one of whom lamented, \”I wish I could just stay with you and give you hugs all day,\” plus an even littler one whose entire face brightened into a smile when I arrived home from work on Monday.
I shrink away from the well-intended advice that the days are long, yet the years are short. That sentiment exacerbates the guilt I feel for not enjoying every moment with my littles. Of course, in almost six years of treading the parenthood path, I have begrudgingly found it to be true…and yet…
I know it\’s okay to struggle with some of the moments (okay, a lot of the moments on some days). I know it\’s okay to hide in my room for a few minutes and cry when it all gets to be too much. I know that parenting can bring out both the best and worst in me. I know it\’s a continuous adventure, and one that I\’m grateful to be on every single moment, even when there\’s wee flooding the bathroom floor.
To Palimpsest 