Please, Please (Please?) Stop Telling Me “It Goes So Fast”
You're killing me.
One of the hardest things about parenting – for me, anyway – has been listening to this constant refrain, everywhere I go:
“Enjoy every minute. It goes so fast.”
Are you a parent? You know exactly what I’m talking about.
I remember the first time someone said these words to me: my son couldn’t have been more than a couple of weeks old, and I was walking down the street, carrying him in a Bjorn-thing and struggling with a bunch of grocery bags with slowly-ripping handles. He was crying and missing a sock, and while I smiled and said “Oh, I am!” at the lady who’d just told me to enjoy myself while my oranges fell out of the bottom of a paper Fairway bag…honestly? She kind of pissed me off. It seemed like the energy it took to remind me that I should be savoring the experience of grocery-shopping with a newborn could have been better-spent helping me retrieve my wayward fruit.
Later on, though, after my son was asleep, her words came back to me – and in an instant I transformed from a tired but basically happy person who was about to enjoy an hour of relative silence in the company of Tim Riggins into a panicky tear-factory, rushing back into my baby’s room to stare at him (and probably wake him up in the process; bye-bye, Tim Riggins) because WHAT IF I DIDN’T APPRECIATE HIM ENOUGH TODAY?!
This is a message that parents of young children hear virtually every day; common variations on the theme include, “Enjoy them; they grow so quickly,” “Savor every moment; it’ll be over before you know it,” and “This is the best time of your life.” I know it’s a message that comes from a benevolent place. It’s intended to make harried, overwhelmed new parents stop and think and realize how lucky they are.
Except that’s never the effect it actually has.
It is an odd side-effect of parenthood, the fact that each and every day you have multiple strangers alerting you to a fact that you already know. Because if you are in the company of your child, you will hear “Enjoy every moment!” on line at Duane Reade. You will hear it at the playground. You will hear it when you are checking your phone and ignoring your children (and feel guilty), and you will hear it when you are devoting every iota of your attention to your children (and feel guilty because you weren’t appreciating the privilege of said devotion enough).
I think parenting young children is a little like climbing Mount Everest. Brave, adventurous souls try it because they’ve heard there’s magic in the climb…Even though any climber will tell you that most of the climb is treacherous, exhausting, killer. That they literally cried most of the way up.
And so I think that if there were people stationed, say, every thirty feet along Mount Everest yelling to the climbers — “ARE YOU ENJOYING YOURSELF!? IF NOT, YOU SHOULD BE! ONE DAY YOU’LL BE SORRY YOU DIDN’T!” TRUST US!! IT’LL BE OVER TOO SOON! CARPE DIEM!” — those well-meaning, nostalgic cheerleaders might be physically thrown from the mountain.
– Don’t Carpe Diem, via Huffington Post
Every time I hear these words, I know that they are meant to make me smile and have a little “aw, yay for kids” moment. What they do instead is remind me that on top of worrying about being a good parent, now I get to worry about whether I’m enjoying parenting enough.
I am aware that my childrens’ childhood is fleeting. I do not need help remembering this. What I need help with is remembering that them growing up is not a tragedy; it is the point.
You know what would have been nice to hear in those early days with my babies? Someone telling me that it’s okay not to think every single minute with them is the best thing ever, because it’s not. That it’s okay to be bored sometimes, and want your kids to go to sleep so you can watch stupid TV shows. That it’s okay to just be with them, and not clutch at every second with a steel grip, ravaged by terror that it’ll blow away and be lost forever and you’ll live in eternal regret that you forgot to indelibly imprint the sight of your child smashing peas into your sofa into your long-term memory.
I’d really have loved to have someone tell me that it’s fun having a baby, and that it’s also fun having a child. I’d still love for someone to tell me about all the cool stuff that there is to look forward to after these early days of parenthood are in the past – up to and including the chance to reconnect with my husband one day in the distant future, when our world is a little less about feeding schedules and a little more about the fact that we just love each other and love being together (which is what started this whole thing in the first place).
So I’m going to do that – or at least the first part of it – for you.
My daughter is one and a half. It is such a cute age – the age when everything she sees is the most exciting thing that has ever happened. She’s uttering her first sentences in an adorable baby-lisp. She smiles and waves hi at everyone, and her skin has that amazing baby smell, and every once in awhile I feel my brain returning to The Grand Old Standby, the sentence that’s guaranteed to reactivate my mostly-dormant anxiety and crank up the old tear ducts:
I just want everything to stay this way forever.
I find myself wishing I could press a pause button on my daughter, make her stay my little baby girl who lies in bed next to me at night and gazes into my eyes and whispers “Love you, mama” for all eternity
.
And then I think about my son. He is four and a half now. He has done the thing that I spent years being afraid he would do: he has grown out of the age when he wants nothing more than to lay on my lap and be held. Except he has also grown into a person who I can have conversations with, who I can talk to about where clouds come from and where the dinosaurs went. He asks questions I can’t answer, and pushes me to keep learning. He tells me elaborate stories about his grandson, and when I tell him I wish I had played soccer when I was a little girl he says, “It’s okay, mama, one day you’ll get older, and then you’ll be born, and then you’ll be a little girl again and you can play as much as you want.” My son makes me believe there is something bigger out there, which is a belief I’ve been searching for for as long as I can remember.
He stuns me with these glimpses of the things he will one day think and say and do. And they are just the beginning.
One day my daughter will be four and a half years old. One day my son will be a teenager. I still hate hearing the words “it goes so fast”…but now I try to take them for what they are: the words of people whose own experiences parenting young children are often many, many years in the past, softened by the passage of time. They miss things about having babies; of course they do. Babies are cute. Except when they’re not, they’re really not. And the idea that anyone is capable of enjoying every moment with one is a fiction.
My best friend’s mom once said, “Don’t do your [family] planning around the pain in the ass of infancy, because it’s so finite. Plan it around how many people you want at Thanksgiving.’
– An old Gwyneth Paltrow quote that I think of often
Babyhood is special, but even more special is getting the chance to find out who those babies become. My children will grow older, but they’re not going anywhere: they’re going to be the same people they are right now…except they’re going to be cooler and more interesting and more themselves every single day. And they’re also not going to need my help wiping their butts, which will be awesome.
The gift of parenthood is not a gift of a handful of years when your children are small: it’s the opportunity to watch – and help – them grow into who they are. Parenting is great, but I have a feeling that the experience of having parented is pretty great, too.
And so many years from now, when I’m walking down the street and see that girl with her Bjorn-ed baby struggling with her grocery bags, here’s what I hope I remember to say to her:
“Being a parent is hard. You’re doing a good job. Can I help you with those oranges?”