MamaBlogga

Time is tricky in motherhood. Hours and days crawl by, while weeks and months fly. We focus on the things we’re looking forward to—kindergarten, babysitting age, the last one to kindergarten—so much that it’s sometimes hard to appreciate the now. We start to get dissatisfied with our lives now until we aches.

And sometimes, that’s not a bad thing. I came across an article called “The tension of the already, but the not yet” that points out that this longing is good when it prompts us for growth:

Maybe this tension is a perfect place? Not because we love being there, but because it’s the beginning of the end of our striving? Maybe this is when we realize that it’s not about us? That ultimately, we’re just part of a greater story that takes time to be written and revealed and at the point of these questions, we don’t know the full story yet.

This reminds me of something I’ve heard about writing. (Sorry, this is so generic that I’m blanking on who said this. Someone who knew what he was talking about.) An experienced writer argues that when we begin writing, we get very discouraged, and consider our writing terrible. And it probably is—and it’s a good thing.

It’s a good thing that we can see the difference between where we are now and where we want to be. We’re comparing our writing to published authors’—people in another stage of their journey, who have more experience and help than we probably do—and we naturally come up short.

But, this writer cautions, don’t let that stop you from writing. Push through this uncomfortable phase, writing and practicing more and more—learning more about and actually becoming what you want to be—until that feeling of being terrible passes. Change your circumstances, and change your attitude—and improve. That feeling keeps us working to get better.

We can’t make time go faster so we can enjoy the next phase sooner (and let’s be honest, we’ll probably still be looking forward to the next stage then), but we can channel this tension, this cognitive dissonance into looking at our lives now to see how we can enjoy them more—and what we may need to change to value and enjoy the present more now.

What do you think? How can you value and enjoy the present more now?

Photo by Joe Philipson

My sister had a baby one week ago today! This is pretty special for me, too: this is the first time any of my sisters has ever had a baby. My first niece or nephew on my side of the family. The first grandbaby for my parents that wasn’t provided by me. Welcome to the world, Preslee! I wish I could be there to snuggle you up, too!

Hayden was a week old when I first felt the time slipping away. Suddenly we weren’t counting his age in days anymore. He hadn’t changed a whole lot since birth (I suppose he was a little more aware and awake, maybe), and yet somehow that change in words made him infinitely older. It presaged the change to months, then years. It was the first time I was losing my baby.

(I had been very sick all week; maybe I was a little melodramatic . But, then, maybe I do this for every child. New mommy hormones?)

Time does seem to slip away from us mothers faster than we can even grasp at it. My baby—my third baby—is one. My sister is a mother. Time marches on and life goes with it.

I want to try not to mourn the recent past instead of enjoying the present. If I obsess over what’s passed, I’ll miss what’s going on now. I have a hard time remembering what Hayden was like at Rebecca’s age or Rachel’s age, but luckily we have photos and videos and blog entries to remind us of that time in our life.

In the mean time, let’s enjoy the present while we have it. (Blah blah blah it’sagiftgagme.)

What are you doing to enjoy the present?

Photo by Kat

I didn’t have a ton of friends in high school, but I had some pretty awesome ones. My best friend from high school, in fact, is also pretty tight with my mom—and her mom loves me. (I love her, too, of course.) My friend’s mom regularly inquires after my wellbeing (awww).

Saturday night at a church activity after one such inquiry, my friend, her mom and my mom were talking about . . . well, me. My friend told my mother, “I don’t know how she does all that she does!”

My mother was like “… Really?” (Remember, these lovely women live 2000 miles away.)

When my mother related the story to me, I told my mom, “Oh, she sees how much I write. She doesn’t see what my house looks like!”

(A side note: according to a survey of 7000 moms by AOL’s Platform-A and OMD, the average mom fits the equivalent of 27 hours of activities into a 16-hour day. Only 1.4 of those hours are “personal time,” of course. The one thing I question about this study: who gets eight hours of sleep?!)