Remember

"And we were all living where I live now, I looked out of the window and saw the children playing by the river. There is a little patch of sand on the bank there. The children were all very young, very small, and they were playing with buckets, and pouring water, and piling sand on each other's feet…I said to myself, "Noah, now you remember this sight, the children being so young together and playing by the river this particular morning. You remember it." And I remember it as if it happened this morning. It must have been summer. There are another twenty years in there I don't remember at all."
-Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard

Today I had a moment.

I was playing with Madison in my bed, tickling her and smelling her little button toes. She giggled and giggled and giggled, and I said,

Oh Madison, how mama wish she had a box, a special kind where she could save up your toothless giggles, the musky baby smell between your toes, the softness of the nook at the back of your neck, the dancing wonder in your eyes gazing in to the world afresh...

And when you and your brother are grown and my nest empty, I can open up this special box, and let the sight, smell, sound, touch of these wonderful days overwhelm me so that I can re-live these glorious days in my mothering...

But I don't have such a box.
The best I can do is to try as hard as I can to remember.
And to remember well.

Raising children is the most fulfilling experience I have ever attempted in my life, and yet, at the same time, it makes life seem very fleeting - because children grow up too fast.

I feel that I spent the past four years trying to breathe in and soak in these glimpses of "moments", these glories in the grime, but I could barely catch up, like chasing the wind.

We always have too much to do, too many relationships to maintain, too many places we have to be, too much time spent on the internet (which may explain why I experienced slight resentment at Facebook lately).

Sometimes I do think, maybe twenty years later when I look back it will all seem like a blur, a twenty years in between that I don't remember at all.

So today, I decided that I have to start remembering well.
That I will take deep breaths, pause, wonder, and see...
in the midst of rocking a child to sleep even my arms feel like rubber;
in the midst of breastfeeding even my child is teething and she bites me sore;
in the midst of a walk to school, even though I know we are running late;
in the midst of being waken up in the middle of the night by a child who had a nightmare and just wanted a hug.

I will take deep breaths, pause, wonder, and see, with patience and delight, because it is in the quietness of the night I feel great comfort in a hug, and in my exhaustion I feel the immensity of motherly love towards these little human beings who were knitted together in my womb once upon a time.

And most importantly, it is because these years are only but a vapor in eternity, like air, you catch it and it is gone.