When we moved to our community 20 years ago this fall, we had a two-year-old and a four-month-old. Although our little family continued to grow with the births of two more children, many places in our community transport me back to the days when I first became a stay-home mom, exploring the area – often with a double stroller.
Over the years, we have spent a significant amount of time in our city’s community centre. All of our children learned to skate and swim at that facility. They have attended birthday parties and team wrap-ups there and, during the rainy months when they were toddlers, they also enjoyed a gym-turned-playground session called “Roaming Rascals.” Complete with tricycles, plastic slides, balls, and toddler-sized climbing equipment, there were many safe, dry activities for little ones to explore and enjoy.
With our youngest child beginning high school this year, I must admit that I had not given much thought to our toddler activities for quite some time. However, attending an advance poll for the federal election at our community centre instantly took me down memory lane – a lane which led directly to the Roaming Rascals gym.
Compounding the nostalgia, our oldest two children were with us. Since the births of their younger sisters, it has been very rare for us to go places with just our elder children, and yet here we were in a room filled with special memories of the early days in our neighbourhood and the early days of our family. How could the young adults in our midst possibly be our first babies? In the very room where they once waited for turns on the bouncy balls, they now waited to cast ballots, and my mind wandered.
Changes are usually gradual, yet sometimes they seem to hit us, like the evening I have just described or when milestone events occur, reminding us that time does not slow down. I have friends who are beginning the next phase of parenthood: the empty nest. After decades of daily life focused on their children (and many more years before that, dreaming of settling down and having a family), that phase is over. Children don’t grow up overnight, and yet somehow it seems as though they do.
Even as we welcome exciting new stages in life, a part of us longs for the past. I love my adult children and I am glad to know them; simultaneously, I miss the babies and children they have been along the way.
The author Emily Stimpson Chapman, the mother of three young children, beautifully describes this phenomenon in her latest book, Letters to Myself from the End of the World. Reflecting on the biggest surprises of motherhood, Stimpson Chapman states that she was unprepared for all of the goodbyes. She writes, “I didn’t realize that you fell in love with a baby who was there one day and gone the next. Nobody told me that each new stage of motherhood is also a little death – the death of the babe that was and the death of the mom you were to them.”
Stimpson Chapman continues, “Growth is good. Progress is a joy … But I miss the newborn, infant, and baby I knew. I want them all. I want to hold every version … in my arms all at once. And I don’t want to let any of them go. That, however, is a gift reserved to God alone. He sees every version of us all at once, holds every version of us all at once, loves every version of us all at once.”
Just as I do not have a favourite child, I do not have a favourite version of any of my children either. I have loved them at every stage. There have been challenging moments, to be sure; however, many times over the years, I have felt the desire to freeze time. How much I would have missed if I could have pressed pause each time I felt that way!
Whether we are welcoming newborns, watching adult children spread their wings, or navigating somewhere in between, we are called to recognize the hello on the tail of each parenting goodbye. Tears may be shed, but welcoming new stages does not mean that we are letting our babies go; we are simply attempting to “hold every version [of them] … all at once.”
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