This May has put me in a rather pensive mood (though that tends to sound peaceful and quiet, which my life is decidedly NOT).  This month my oldest turned 9, my youngest turned 6 months, and my husband and I will be celebrating our 11th anniversary.  All of these things are much bigger to me than to anyone else in the world, of course.  Even other family members see my son's birthday as just a date, a gift, and some cake - while I see it as an amazing passage of an impossible amount of time.  Nine years?  Where in the world did nine years go?  I look at my six month old and it seems anachronistic because I feel that my oldest was just that size.  Really.  How could I have both?  Not to mention the three children in between!  When did that happen?  And having a 9 year old, and being married eleven years (officially more than a decade), wouldn't that make me an adult now?  When did that happen?  

I keep thinking about when I was nine, and the memories that I have are so vivid and full of detail.  Now that is my son, and it worries me about my own words, actions, even decorating!  I remember going to friends' houses and I still can describe what each of their home's atmospheres felt like, what their moms were like, and what my own home was like.  Have I made conscious choices to create an atmosphere that reflects me to my children and their friends?  Not really.   I mostly react to life - flying by the seat of my pants.  Suddenly I am looking around and trying to see it all through the eyes of my kids.  I wonder where I've taken them in my haphazard journey.  Shouldn't parenting be like a planned out, methodological, pedagogy?  

But life moves so fast, and kids are so unpredictable.  It's like trying to hold water in your hands.  Every time that I try to take control and establish systems and order, I find my hands empty and the water flowing down the stream.  And so instead of holding on, I guess I just jump in and let it take me along.  It is more satisfying to be caught up in the current, drenched in and surrounded by life.  I enjoy things more - until I feel guilty that a good parent should be controlling it all - planning it and supervising - so I stand and try to stop the whole river with my bare hands once again.  

Alright - enough with the stupid river analogy.  The passage of time is a weird thing though.  I've heard others say that it seems to move faster as we get older.   It does move faster.  Though the actual unit of time is constant, relative to how much time we've each been on earth, it moves more quickly by virtue of being a smaller and smaller percentage of the whole.  For a one-week-old baby, one day is something like 14% of their life - but for the baby's 30 year old mom, that day is more like .0009%.  So when it seems that a lazy day of childhood summer lasted forever, and as adults we can't seem to ever find a day like that anymore - it is true - relatively.  

But somehow having kids seems to slow it down a bit.  It's as if we can latch on to their relative timeframe sometimes and share that magical almost-stand-still time.  I think that is most apparent with babies.  I have so many questions about babies, and one of the top on my list is why watching them is so fascinating.  I consider myself a reasonably intelligent person, and yet I find myself gazing for extended periods of time at that tiny face.  What for?  I can put in a masterpiece of a movie to watch while holding my sleeping baby, only to ignore the film while I watch my baby sleep!  Sleeping!!  Not even doing anything!!  Why?  But I can't help myself.  And for those moments, time goes slower - focus gets very clear.  And I watch my baby, with her curled eyelashes resting on her velvety cheeks, and listen, completely enchanted by her breathing - as if it is her unique invention and no one has ever breathed before.  Maybe that is why we want to have children.  Perhaps it is the uniqueness of every moment, and the way those moments step out of our quicker-paced adult time. 

Wordsworth covers this arc so beautifully in "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood."   I loved the poem when I was in college, but I now realize how little I really understood it before I had kids.   I'll sign off with a slightly abridged copying the poem, which is one of my favorites.  It's long, but beautiful, so take a moment to read it - every time I discover something more insightful.

"There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

The earth, and every common sight,

To me did seem

Apparelled in celestial light,

The glory and the freshness of a dream.

It is not now as it hath been of yor; --

Turn wheresoe'er I may,

By night or day,

The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

The Rainbow comes and goes,

And lovely is the Rose,

The Moon doth with delight

Look round her when the heavens are bare,

Waters on a starry night 

Are beautiful and fair;

The sunshine is a glorious birth;

But yet I know, wher'er I go,

That there hath past away a glory from the earth

Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song,

And while the young lambs bound

As to the tabor's sound,

To me alone there came a thought of grief;

A timely utterance gave that thought relief,

And I again am strong:

The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;

No more shall grief of mine the season wrong;

I hear the Echoes through the mountains throng,

The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep,

And all the earth is gay;

Land and sea

Give themselves up to jollity.

and with the heart of May

Doth every Beast keep holiday; --

Thou child of Joy

Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy Shepherd-boy!

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;

The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting, 

And cometh from afar:

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Shades of the prison-house begin to close

Upon the growing Boy,

But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,

He sees it in his joy;

The Youth, who daily farther from the east

Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,

And by the vision splendid

Is on his way attended;

At length the Man perceives it die away,

And fade into the light of common day.

Behold the Child among his new-born blisses,

A six years' Darling of a pigmy size!

See, where 'mid work of his own hand he lies,

Fretted by sallies of his mother's kisses,

With light upon him from his father's eyes!

See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,

Some fragment from his dream of human life,

Shaped by himself with newly-learned art;

A wedding or a festival,

A mourning or a funeral;

And this hath now his heart,

And unto this he frames his song:

Then will he fit his tongue

To dialogues of business, love, or strife;

But it will not be long

Ere this be thrown aside,

And with new joy and pride

The little Actor cons another part;

Filling from time to time his "humorous stage:

With all the Persons, down to palsied Age,

That Life brings with her in her equipage;

As if his whole vocation

Were endless imitation

Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie

Thy Soul's immensity 

Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep

Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind,

That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep,

Haunted for ever by the eternal mind, --

Mighty Prophet!  Seer blest!

On whom those truths do rest,

Which we are toiling all our lives to find,

In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave;

Thou, over whom thy Immortality

Broods like the Day, a Master o'er a Slave,

A Presence which is not to be put by;

Thou little Child, yet glorious in the might

of heaven-born freedom on thy being's height,

Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke

The years to bring the inevitable yoke,

Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife?

Full soon thy Soul shall have her earthly freight,

And custom lie upon thee with a weight,

Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!

O joy! that in our embers

Is something that doth live,

That nature yet remembers

What was so fugitive!

The thought of our past years in me doth breed

Perpetual benediction; not indeed

For that which is most worthy to be blest;

Delight and liberty, the simple creed

Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest,

With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast: --

Not for these I raise

The song of thanks and praise;

But for those obstinate questionings

Of sense and outward things,

Fallings from us, vanishings;

Blank misgivings of a Creature

Moving about in worlds not realised,

High instincts before which our mortal Nature

Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised:

But for those first affections

Those shadowy recollections

Which, be they what they may,

Are yet the fountain light of all our day,

Are yet a master light of all our seeing;

Uphold us, cherish and have power to make

Our noisy years seem moments in the being

Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,

To perish never;

Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavor,

Nor Man nor Boy,

Nor all that is at enmity with joy,

Can utterly abolish or destroy!

Hence in a season of calm weather

Though inland far we be,

Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea

Which brought us hither,

Can in a moment travel thither,

And see the Children sport upon the shore,

And hear the might waters rolling evermore.

Then sing, ye Birds, sing, sing a joyous song!

And let the young Lambs bound

As to the tabor's sound!

We in thought will join in your throng,

Ye that pipe and ye that play,

Ye that through your hearts to-day

Feel the gladness of the May!

What though the radiance which was once so bright

Be now for ever taken from my sight,

though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;

We will grieve not, rather find

Strength in what remains behind;

In the primal sympathy

Which having been must ever be;

In the soothing thoughts that spring

Out of human suffering;

In the faith that looks through death,

In years that bring the philosophic mind.

And O, ye Fountains, meadows, Hills, and Groves,

Forebode not any severing of our loves!

Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;

I only have relinquished one delight

To live beneath your more habitual sway.

I love the Brooks which down their channels fret,

Even more than when I tripped lightly as they;

The innocent brightness of a new-born Day

Is lovely yet;

The Clouds that gather round the setting sun

Do take a sober colouring from an eye

that hath kept watch o'er man's mortality;

Another race hath been, and other palms are won.

thanks to the human heart by which we live,

Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,

To me the meanest flower that blows can give

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."

 - William Wordsworth

As I walk around my house filled with little people and all their little things - from small scale furniture to itty-bitty socks - I often feel like a giant, like Gulliver when his travels brought him to live in the land of the Lilliputians.  Swift wrote Gulliver's Travels as a political analogy, but I don't think I'm stretching much to see that parenting involves some of the same challenges as governing, especially when those diminutive beings we call children seem to have a language and culture that is completely foreign (any parent who understands their 2 year old when no one else can, or lets a child make their own sandwich with whatever toppings they want can back me up).  My experiences with my children (five of them between the ages of 5 months and 9 years old) teach me and challenge me in a way I never would have believed.

After giving birth to my oldest son, life changed dramatically.  I was now completely responsible for every detail of life for this tiny non-communicative person.  At least, I thought that he was non-communicative.  Then I learned, like an anthropologist, to watch for patterns in behavior and noises.  Before long, I was able to tell the hungry cry from the anger cry from the pain cry.  That was my first clue that this was going to take just as much study and learning on my part as it would for the growing and developing baby.  It wasn't at all like the sculpting of raw material into a perfect child who would then become a paragon of a man - the one my imagination had created during my pregnancy.  No - I was on his turf, and as each subsequent child arrived at our house, outnumbering the adults and transforming our house into Lilliput, I became Gulliver - the giant in a land of small human creatures.  It is their culture that I learn, their languages I respond to, and their imaginations that define our household.  Not that I let them run the roost - there is discipline, and I am a serious parent - but the little people's interests often supersede my own.  I'm not complaining; living in a world where you can be a pirate one minute and a princess the next is exhilarating and joyous.  It pushes me to my intellectual and emotional limits as I try to balance living and learning in their world while teaching and guiding them so that they will grow to someday join the land of the big people.

Like Gulliver, through studying the odd habits of this tiny foreign culture, I find myself learning more about my pre-suppositions.  Every time I upbraid a child and their response is "why not," I have to pause and really think about it.  Seriously, why not eat spaghetti for breakfast?  Why not color your entire body with magic markers?  Why not wear a Superman cape everywhere you go?  And on and on...  Why do we do things one way and not another?  As adults we get so set in expectations and established thought patterns that we don't even question our actions.  Kids force us to do that.  In a society that increasingly values self-discovery, this shouldn't be undervalued.  The premise of "Eat, Pray, Love," a phenomenally popular book about "finding," oneself, is that "stepping outside the box," going somewhere completely foreign from your own life helps to gain perspective on the pre-suppositions that have created that "box."  I believe that is true - it has happened to me.  I studied in France while I was in college, and it definitely altered how I think of things.  I mark it as a major life-changing event that challenged all of my notions of self.  I came back different.  But I came back.  The perspective shift was invaluable in my self-development, but the amazing thing about being a mom is that kids are not a life-changing event - they are life and change forever and ever - every day is a paradigm shift, an epiphany.  Every day I find out who I am again, only to have it challenged and re-created the next day.  Having children - living with them, learning from them, teaching them, loving them unconditionally, being infinitely responsible for and tied to other lives - teaches us, helps us, shows us the depths of ourselves in a way that little else truly can.

But being a parent is not all sweetness and light.  It is appropriate for my analogy that the Lilliputians captured Gulliver and kept him chained as their prisoner.  Sometimes parenting does feel claustrophobic - no matter how much I adore my children and wouldn't give it up for anything.  There are poopy diapers and pouting and calls from the school principal.  There are those dark and naked moments when inadequacy barely begins to describe how I feel.  Night after night of little sleep.  Day after day of absolutely never ending demands that MUST be met, and I am the only one to meet them.  Even with an unbelievably wonderful husband who is the best of all possible dads, I am, like most moms, ultimately responsible and it overwhelms me.  And yet even from this I learn more about myself.  There is a raw, primal side of parenting - a "find out what you're truly made of" side.  The all-night vigil over a sick child when I haven't had any sleep for what seems like forever taking care of other ill children for several previous nights, and I am also ill, and the fever breaks and the child sleeps just as the baby wakes up crying, and then the day starts and there is breakfast to get and school and homework and every other trivial and non-trivial need to attend to and I'm not sure if I'm even fully conscious or fully human any more.  All previous accomplishments and honors mean nothing, all social recognition and status are stripped away; I stand devoid of everything but the core of who I am - and I find out I'm strong.  Even if I'm falling apart and weeping like the children I'm caring for, I am still standing.  It's a Rocky moment.  Nothing can beat me down.

And that is why I'm starting this blog.  To share what I learn.  It may be just another of the hundreds of "Mom Blogs" out there, but I prefer to think of it as an anthropological journal of sorts - a record of a species of humans with the potential to teach us all more about ourselves - a journey from the heights of joy to the gates of hell without a road map of any kind.  If that sounds like an interesting trip, stay tuned....