Nothing prepares you for what your heart will go through once you become a mother. You can never predict when your heart will break from their rebellion, a personal trial, or an illness. There is no telling how it can simultaneously hold any amount of sorrow when it also feels full to bursting with joy, love, contentment, or happiness. Tidal waves of highs and lows are as constant as the kids’ shoes left scattered by the front door.
When your children are little, you think you have control. You tell them when to eat, when to sleep, when to wake up. You tell them what to wear, whether they can run up the slide instead of coming down on their bottoms, whether they can go to their friend’s house or join a sports team. You teach them how to use a spoon, a fork, a bathroom. You watch their first steps, swoon at their first slobbery but meaningful kiss on your cheek, cry at their first scrape. You teach the rules, reinforce the rules, and occasionally break the rules. So much control.
When they get older, you have no control. Your heart now walks around in six confident pieces. With likes and dislikes of their own, schedules of their own, decisions they make on their own, attitudes of their own (oh, my, so much attitude!), they begin their journey to independence one teenage misstep at a time.
I no longer kiss scrapes, and bandaids aren’t as cool as toughing it out. Instead of incessantly playing Sorry or Uno, I now play “Workin’ Hard for the Money”,“Half-full or Half-empty: A Gas Up-n-Go Game”, and “Curfew: Yes or No” with them. Bedtime is an idea and implies I’m heading upstairs at a decent hour because apparently these kids need no sleep at all. Coincidentally, instead of conversations taking place at the crack of dawn, they now happen right at the moment I’m almost asleep. Either way, I have to pry my eyes open so I seem fully engaged.
One of the harder aspects of parenting older children is sitting back and letting them learn life through their own choices. For instance, this morning, Ellie chose to buy her mother a large coffee, to go along with the pretzels she made, ensuring her mother wouldn’t be grumpy. Anna learned that when she makes chocolate peanut butter cookies, her mother eats them all. Isaac learned that if he buys anything ocean-themed, his mother will love it. Caleb and James learned they can “wing it” by painting mini canvases in under ten minutes as gifts to their mother. Caleb showcased his acquisition of patience by running into his mother’s room at 6:00 am with a gift but waiting to give it to her until after lunch. Jake learned that if he discretely* leaves the room whenever Mother’s Day activities are taking place, his mother will write about it in her blog.
I realize this post took a jocular turn, but I believe it also emphasizes my earlier attempt to explain that a mother’s heart can synchronously hold conflicting, coinciding, correlating, or comedic feelings regarding her children and their actions. We mean it when we say our hearts are bursting! Though I am guilty of sometimes thinking who are these kids and why are they calling me Mom, raising these hooligans has been one of the greatest privileges of my life. But please send more coffee, and maybe some toothpicks to prop open my eyes.
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