Kids don't stay little, but they do stay your kids.
When the boys were little, we bought a cabin tent with the credits my husband had saved up on our L.L. Bean card and used it maybe twice.
When the boys were little, we spent all our vacations either with his parents or mine, spending Christmas in southern Florida with Santas in Hawaiian shirts, or up in Maine watching the sun set by 3pm.
The summer months found us fishing for crabs off the dock by a lighthouse in Maine, or watching them walk off with their other grandfather, who we would visit in Vermont, hand in hand to make their daily trip to the convenience store down the road.
During those long drives in our mini-van, we would watch videos on a portable TV that had a DVD player in it. “Veggie Tales” was the favorite, a show they can still recite verbatim.
When the boys were little, we read to them every night in their room, sometimes piling onto the same single bed, sometimes splitting up, but always where they could both see the pictures, and always ending with a prayer of gratitude to God, along with a kiss and a whisper or two, telling them how much we loved them.
Those days seem far away now.
Our boys have long since left the nest that was their childhood, and our parenthood. But I keep hearing those words spoken by either me or my husband, “When the boys were little.” It has become a place frozen in time like, “When we were dating.” It has its own ambiance, its own smell and flavor and rhythm.
As I sort through old journals that I kept when our boys were little, I remember more of the details of that time: The exhaustion, the doubt, the worries. Was I doing it right? Did anyone do it right?
We want so badly to be good parents, but reading all the how-to books in the world can’t assure us we will be. It is an art form, not a science. And the arts are ephemeral, exacting, and can take years to perfect. Years you don’t have as a parent.
So, you do your best, hoping the lessons you learned before you had kids will serve them well. Lessons of the importance of faith and hope and compassion. And you hope that is enough and that your grown up children will know they were loved, are loved, and that they will know, deep down, that their story will always be part of yours.
