It’s probably pregnancy hormones. I’m just going to say that right up front.
But ohmygoodness … right now, this moment, this life? My heart breaks and bursts at every turn– sometimes in the very same moment.
Every second of every day seems laced with so much emotion. I cannot see my children interacting, hear my daughter’s voice, feel this baby move, think about the summer ahead without feeling a ricochet of joy and pain that leaves me on the verge of tears.
Because all of this is fleeting.
It’s all sand through my fingers.
And I want to freeze it here, now.
Oh, it’s not perfect. Not by a long shot. If I had my druthers, I would weave Babita’s slow laughter and stubborn spunk into the fabric of our days. Her absence is palpable to all of us; we feel it with every moment that should be a full heart, all of us together scene that we can snapshot in our memory. So no, it’s not that this is a season so inescapably flawless that it deserves to be preserved.
It’s something else, something I realize in waves as I grow older: Life is here and now and before you know it, the little things you think will always be are gone.
Right now, I find myself awash in that awareness so keenly that I can barely catch my breath.
Mary Hannah is here, right now, sitting on the couch across from me and checking her email on an iPad. But in a few short months, her voice will be on the other end of a phone line when I want to share a joke with her. Simon is an enchanting 2 year-old, charming his way onto sibling’s laps, sporting a backpack more often than not. But soon he’ll slip into even more independence, lose what tiny bit of baby fat he has left, and be a preschooler. Birdie is currently fascinated with writing words, making books, and sweeping with her little straw broom. This fall, though, she’ll be a kindergartener plunging into headier waters and losing just a pinch of that adorable sweetness that makes four so precious.
And it’s not just these three. It’s all of them. It’s even my husband. I look at him, still the man who makes my heart beat a little wildly, and I realize that we’re not 30 anymore. Heck … before too long, we’ll be saying goodbye to our 40s.
It’s all too much. If I could, I would freeze it all, right here, where I could hold it in my hand and drink it in, forever.
But that’s not the way that life works. That’s not the way God designed our days. We are but dust– all of us. And even before we’re dust, we’re growing, changing, organic beings not designed to cling too long to this season or time. So I look around me, I soak it in, I thank God for the good and the bad and the ability to enjoy them both, and I live in the now. Because tomorrow will be here before I know it, bringing something new to cherish and to want to hold onto forever.
I feel this so deeply right now as well. Guiding, chiding, loving, laughing, crying, aching…it’s all part of my life on a near daily basis. I remember being in the stage of having all small children, feeling like those days would never end. Now I am grasping at each moment, I just feel so desperately how fleeting they are.