Today my oldest turns 16.
At baby showers, at prenatal appointments, at the grocery store, friends and strangers alike would often warn: “Enjoy it. It goes by so fast.”
And I knew what they meant. Of course I did. Time flies. I was no stranger to the concept. After all, childhood, college, pregnancy, they all passed me by in a flash.
When he arrived, I savored his newborn smell. I relished the snuggles and his endless need for me. Even when it was hard and I was bleary-eyed and bone-weary and we bounced and swayed around the house trailing a path of spit up and dropped pacifiers on the hardwoods at 5:30 to The Chicks waiting for my husband to come home and help I knew it would be over before I was ready. Every day brought a new discovery. Every change meant the end of something else that once had been new.
I tried to be patient and present. He took his first steps and asserted his first opinions. I read endless books and played trains and swung on the swings at the park. I let him get dirty and explore. I rerolled the toilet paper when he unraveled a new roll he’d somehow smuggled into his room when he was supposed to be napping, which he conveniently gave up when I was pregnant with his little brother. So instead we had quiet time, laying on my bed with a woven blanket over our heads, tiny pin pricks of light shining through the weave and we gasped at all those little stars in our pretend night sky.
I watched as he confidently walked into preschool without a second glance and again when he hopped on the school bus with a smile, ready for the first day of kindergarten, no parent walk-in required. There was the summer he found a home repair book on the shelf and became obsessed with electricity. He learned to swim and ride a bike. He handled a move to a new state and a new school and made new friends. His fifth grade teacher lovingly dubbed him the official Grammar Police. He joined a rock climbing gym class and started middle school.
He survived a pandemic and braces and a giant growth spurt. He took up the drums. He started high school and joined the Marching Band.
He’s discovering himself and his place in the world and it is amazing to see. I couldn’t be more proud of who he is and who he is becoming.
And yet.
It is going by so fast.
The 30 hours of labor it took to bring him into the world are still so fresh in my mind. I can still picture the ill fitting sock I had on my foot that I didn’t replace for another because it was warm. I remember the anticipation and the long uneventful first night. My body remembers the pain of the early contractions that sucked my breath and twisted my abdomen and the warm gush of my water breaking as my parents arrived at the hospital. I can still place myself in the dark hours of the second night, my father keeping me company while everyone slept and my epidural kept me from feeling the worst of it but my soon to be first born remained cozily tucked in my body, not ready to make an appearance. I can taste the fear when the nurse midwife indicated we were inching up on time to consider a c-section and that I needed to dig deep and find a way to push through. And then. Somehow. Miraculously. There he was. A tiny scrape on his forehead from the internal fetal monitor he’d slid past. Ten long fingers and toes, a shock of brown hair on his head, his deep blue eyes hidden behind his scrunched up eyelids adjusting to the light of the outside world.
How can those memories be so fresh, so real and visceral, while he is so different? He’s changed a million times over since that first moment we met. And will change a million times over again in his life.
The days are long, but the years are short.
There were days trapped in a house during potty training or staying up late worried about a fever or waiting to pick him up near midnight after a faraway marching competition. Days that seemed to never end and yet they slid by remarkably fast in the aggregate.
Sixteen.
I’ve got three more school years before he’s off to college and our relationship changes again.
Which is how it should be. I know this.
Everyone warned me it would go by fast.
But no one warned me what that would feel like.
Bittersweet.
Excitement as each new phase begins. Despair as each phase ends. The feel of surrounding a newborn in my arms with my whole self to now being engulfed in bony hugs by a child suddenly taller than I am, who holds me as much as I hold him. Sadness that the little boy is gone, but joy in seeing that child’s essence still inside the person he is.
In these 16 years, I have been growing and changing next to him. Perhaps it isn’t as obvious in the same way it is when a thing that didn’t exist to the world before August 10th, 2006 takes up so much physical space on the couch in 2022, but I can feel it. He has changed me a million times over. I am not the woman I was in 2006. And thank goodness. He has made me a much better mother and person than I ever could have hoped to be on my own.
Sixteen.
Wow.
Happy Birthday, T.
“Time Flies” featured photo above by Belinda Fewings on Unsplash