Ready or Not, Here I Grow: A Mother’s Chronicles in Being So Very Far From Ready

Have you ever experienced that phenomenon wherein something that you look at every day inexplicably becomes invisible to you? Maybe it’s an ever-growing stack of mail that manages to escape your peripheral vision, a pile of laundry that needs to be sorted, or maybe the mantel that you always mean to redecorate but somehow never do. Soon these things just fade into the background, and although your eyes undoubtedly graze over them often, you never really see and process them the way you know you should.

This happened to me recently with Valentine’s Day cards that I miraculously thought to purchase ahead of time (for a change). Upon arriving home from the store, victorious with cards in hand, I promptly deposited them on the windowsill above my kitchen sink. My intention, of course, was that I would see them every day and, as such, be constantly reminded to get those suckers in the mail on time. Fast forward two weeks—T minus four days—and what do you think I notice perched on that windowsill for the first time since I’d placed them there? That’s right. My stack of Valentine’s Day cards. I had obviously stared directly at them a million times a day and yet somehow I only really recognized what I was looking at that lone time.

Well, they say lightning doesn’t strike twice, but just ask me (and any other multiple strike victim), and we’ll give you a different story. Because right there, in that very kitchen, my daughter was also hiding in plain sight. What’s strange is that I obviously do more than see her every day. I hug her, laugh with her, discipline her, feed her, and play with her. I marvel over the things she says, cringe when the number of things she says seems to have no end, and oftentimes believe the time we spend together—doing the exact same things that we did today—is infinite. But late one evening, while drowsily browsing through the camera roll on my phone, a picture jumped out at me and took my breath away. There staring back at me in one illuminated little square was not my baby girl but an older, true life “big girl.” Her expression is serene and soulful; she stands poised and self-possessed in dress-up heels; and the image she projects is not at all in line with that of the clumsy toddler I obviously still associated her with in my mind’s eye. I stared in disbelief at the picture for a moment as the very unwelcome realization seeped in that my little girl is actually not all that little anymore.

Every mommy has a story similar to this one, every mommy blogger writes a post detailing her moment—the moment when she first is electrifyingly aware that time is not actually standing still as she had come to believe during the never-ending days/weeks/months of her first child’s infancy. You can’t help but talk about it. It stops you in your tracks, makes your eyes well with tears, and changes your perspective in a way nothing else can. Sure, I’ve heard my fair share of other parents’ recountings of their “moment,” and though each one touches me and convicts me that yes, I need to be present and intentional and kind because time is fleeting, nothing prepared me for the instant when I got hit upside the head with my own realization.

Thinking you can grasp the enormity of what will confront you in your moment via other people’s accounts is no different than assuming you are prepared for childbirth because you watch A Baby Story and have heard your friends’ birth stories or believing you are ready to raise your own children because you did a lot of babysitting in your day. It happens to you, and whoa—you thought you knew, but you had no idea.

Looking back on my relatively short tenure as a mom, I am truly amazed by how much I’ve cherished being a mommy to my two littles. I had always assumed infancy and early childhood was something to be endured rather than enjoyed, and I’m pretty sure that had the option been available to fast forward to age four upon delivery of my children, I would’ve signed myself right up without a moment’s hesitation. And oh, what I would have missed. I never thought I would be a “baby person,” but I have loved raising newborns, babies, and toddlers after that. Every stage has brought with it unexpected discoveries and delight, and I’ve met each milestone with joy tinged with sorrow knowing that every bit of “progress” signified a step towards a future I wasn’t sure I was ready to face. But certainly making the leap from baby girl to real life big girl has been the most emotional (and reluctant) transition I’ve faced yet.

The warning signs were here all along, but true to form, I’ve been ignoring them. We’ve had “best friend” drama among her preschool set. Some days her closest friends will play with her on the playground, while other days she reports back to me that they ran away from her so she played by herself that day. These recountings break my heart, and when I think back to the complex dynamics of the social scene I experienced with elementary-, middle-, and high-school-aged girls, I think to myself, “Lord have mercy, I’m not ready.”

We’ve spent many recent weekends more or less cooped up inside our house due to a variety of circumstances, and one Saturday not too long ago my daughter asked if we could invite her friends over. I was truly enjoying our time together and suggested we instead keep playing with her brother. Just us. Just family. Her response was immediate and resolute and caught me completely off guard: “No, Mommy,” she demanded. “I don’t want to play with you and Nathan. I want to play with my friends.” “But, wait, Anna,” I wanted to say, “I am your friend. I am the person you want to play with endlessly. You are the princess, and I am your king—remember?” I took that play for granted. More often than not, I begrudgingly went through the motions with her or just completely dialed it in as I tried to sneak glances at my phone to see what exciting things my friends in the “outside world” were up to. What a fool I was. I thought about how I spent the better portion of my formative years on a mission to keep my mom as far on the outside of my inner circle as possible, and I shudder to think my daughter, who regularly asks me if I will marry her and live with her forever, will soon see me this way. Be still my heart—I am not ready.

And perhaps most disastrously of all? My daughter is no longer consistently taking naps. In fact, I’m now lucky if I get one nap a week out of her. And this really seems to have happened overnight. One week she was taking predictable two- to three-hour naps, the next—I can’t even coax five minutes of peaceful rest out of her until the sun goes down. My nerves are shot, my house is a wreck, and she grows horns and a tail right around 4:00 P.M. Can I get an amen when I say I am really, really not ready?

Luckily, I was able to get those overlooked Valentine’s Day cards in the mail just in time for them to greet their out-of-state recipients by Valentine’s Day. Disaster averted. And thankfully for me, I was powerfully reminded by a single photograph to cherish and appreciate the precious (and often long) days spent with my children that I am prone to glossing over and looking right through. Yes, sometimes I would rather be anywhere but here at home running through the frustrating getting-dressed, out-the-door, OMG-(fill in the blank)-shouldn’t-be-THIS-hard routine that often constitutes the life of a mother of littles. And yes, sometimes I will still mentally check out via Facebook in the midst of these days as a sanity-preserving measure, and that’s OK because it ain’t always easy or fun. But even in the midst of the ugly days, there are flashes of brilliance as I stand in the presence of these little humans who change and develop so fast that each day is its own lifetime: something to be studied and marveled over but never, ever to be repeated again. My little girl is growing up, and even though I don’t feel anywhere close to being ready, I’m packing my bags and going along for the ride anyway. There’s really nowhere else I’d rather be.