My Back Won't Always Hurt Like This
(more) musings on the passage of time
Posted by Arwen Mosher
in Family
on Saturday, August 11, 2012 11:38 AM
When Camilla was a newborn she screamed for hours. Starting when she was three weeks old our evenings were filled with it: pacing, rocking, bouncing, driving around the neighborhood at midnight. We’d try anything to get our precious child to calm down.
During that time I read somewhere that infant fussiness peaks at six to eight weeks and I thought despondently, “We will not make it. That is a forever number of screamy hours away, and there is no way we are going to survive until then.”
Yesterday Camilla, who is almost six and about to begin first grade, lost her first tooth. My baby! Has a hole in her mouth for an adult tooth to grow into!
Eh, so. Time flies. It’s a cliche for a good reason.
But it’s difficult to remember when you’re in the trenches of parenting very small very needy people. Blaise was once a twenty-pound five-month-old who couldn’t yet sit up so instead of carrying him on my hip, I had to hold him with both arms in front of my body. I recall thinking, “Well, my arms might actually fall off. He is huge and this stage will never end and eventually my arms will give up and abandon me.”
(I didn’t have twins yet, so had little vision of my real potential arm strength.)
Spoiler alert: Blaise grew out of that stage, quickly, and is now a practically-adult three-year-old who does not want me to hold his hand while crossing the street. I refrain from reminding him how I almost lost my arms carrying his baby self around, because that is the kind of generous mother I am.
Thank goodness I’ve been through this before, because my twins are just finishing up a particularly needy clingy stage (developmental, I think) that had me spending multiple hours of each day in direct physical contact with both of them, trying to hold, nurse, cuddle, amuse, placate, do anything that would make them stop fussing at me.
(Sometimes I hide in the bathroom. I’m not ashamed.)
I am grateful to have my big kids around, because I see them and remember: I thought she’d never stop screaming. I thought I’d be lugging him around forever. And now look at them! Look at them, and the way they talk and laugh and play and help and are endlessly fascinating and hilarious and BIG.
Linus and Ambrose will get there, one day/hour/minute at a time, and then I’ll look back and think: wow, that time flew.
And on that note, if you haven’t yet, go read Simcha Fisher’s “Escape from Babyland.” It’s a lovely piece of encouragement for young mothers like me, and my favorite thing I read this week.
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My younger son, an 11lb baby, is now a 25-lb 8 month old. Luckily for me he sat up on his own by 4 mo and crawled at 5 mo, but he is killing my back—and with a husband working from before the boys get up to after they go down and parents who can’t pick him up bc of their own injuries, I’m the only game in town for Mega Baby. Now he wants to stand and practice walking, so when I’m not hefting his enormity, I’m leaning over to “walk” with him. Soon, I tell myself…soon he will be walking away from me and want to do everything himself, but…some days it is still not soon enough!
If my children were not both so adorable I would find the sleepless nights, endless work, exhaustion, and clean-up of vomit and diarrhea to be more than I could bear. I am SO SO SO grateful to God for my children. Where would I be without them?