I drive up and see her standing with her friends out front, her cropped shirt barely passing the high school dress code. She sees me, giving me only a side glance at most, but pretends that she doesn’t because she wants to keep talking to her friends. I sit in my car, growing more impatient with each passing minute, fingers drumming on the steering wheel as cars begin to pile up behind me. Desperate to avoid a traffic jam situation, I text her.
“Hey, I’m here.”
She replies, “Yeah, I see you.”
She is literally texting me back instead of walking to the car. Sometimes I just cannot.
“I’ve got to move!”
In no rush, she finishes up her conversation and then casually walks to the car like I haven’t been waiting, like there’s not about to be a mutiny happening in this carline.
“Hey!” She’s as cool as a cucumber; meanwhile my frustration is borderline crazed lunatic level. She settles into the passenger seat and beaming says, “Mom, I only have four more years at home!”
The frustration fades into panic. Four years?! Four years and she’s out on her own. Lord, help us all. I have a lot of work to do.
Teens are finicky creatures. Sometimes they’ll creep downstairs late at night and curl up on the couch and spill all the tea on what’s happening in their world. Other times (most times) they hide out in their rooms, laughing as they FaceTime with friends or talk in hushed tones over headphone speakers while they play video games, casting a look of disdain if you dare open their bedroom door to peek in.
I look up from writing this to see a hummingbird graciously visiting my backyard butterfly garden. It’s been months since I’ve seen one of them. I get up from my chair to stand at the window and watch in amazement at how quickly it flits from flower to flower, wings flapping rapidly. What else is happening just outside my window that I’ve been too distracted to notice? Often, I feel like I’m so busy trying to be a mother- doing all the mom things…laundry, cooking, baking, shopping, driving, cleaning, more driving and more cleaning- that I somehow miss out on the real joy of mothering. The real gems of motherhood are found in the quiet moments that have the potential to slip by unnoticed. A request for a trip to Starbucks. An eager retelling of the events of recess. Conversations about their friends. An opportunity to acknowledge them for a job well done. It’s all too easy to say no to Starbucks, interrupt their stories to tell them to do the chores they forgot to do, or assume they know that I’m proud of them and encourage them to aim for a 100 next time instead of a 90. It’s easy to become distracted with all of the busyness of mothering and miss out on being fully present as a mother.
At church on Sunday morning, we sat towards the back like usual, assuming our normal row. The pastor was well into his sermon, preaching of grace and mercy and love, and I was admittedly miserably bored. He was offering no new insight into a verse I’d read a hundred times since childhood. My eyes wandered around, taking in the room around me. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something quickly scurry across the floor under the row in front of me. Now, everything is bigger in Texas, and that means giant, larger than life roaches are a staple around here that none of us Texans are eager to claim. You never get used to seeing them. It’s always disturbing and a scream never fails to build up in the back of your throat, threatening to release into a sort of battle cry if necessary. Here we were, sitting through a snooze fest of a sermon, and a giant roach has found its way into this place of peace and solace. It ran wildly across the aisle. I watched in absolute horror as it dared to violate any number of churchgoers. A lady on the end of the aisle was wearing flip flops, her heel lifted up from the bottom of her shoe, and I held my breath as the roach crawled across the spot where her heel should have been. I audibly gasped, wondering what sweet terror this roach would impart next. The lady remained completely clueless, listening to the pastor with rapt attention. The roach scurried on, ready to claim its next victim. I erratically waved my arms around, getting my husband’s attention so that he could promptly get up and stomp on that roach, putting an end to the madness that potentially lied ahead. I sat back, feeling a little unhinged, but also, oddly awake and alive.
What could be scurrying just under my nose that I’m too busy to notice? I don’t know how many times my youngest daughter has mentioned that I’m always on my phone. I take instant offense to this accusation.
“No, well I was just using my phone to read the recipe while I was making dinner. And then your cheer coach called, and I remembered that I needed to buy your cheer shoes. So, then I had to get online and search for cheer shoes to order. And I really didn’t want to pick just any shoes, so I had to read all the reviews. Then, thinking about cheer reminded me that I needed to make a doctor appointment, so then I had to try to log onto the healthcare portal. But I couldn’t remember my password, so then I had to go create a new password and that took a while…and…What was it you wanted to do with me?”
Being fully present is no small feat. We are bombarded with information and content constantly. We must be vigilant in protecting our time and energy. I’ve been reading The Power of Moments by Chip Heath and Dan Heath (it’s brilliant and thought provoking), and one of my key takeaways has been that “our lives are measured in moments, and defining moments are the ones that endure in our memories…Defining moments shape our lives, but we don’t have to wait for them to happen. We can be authors of them.”
Today my oldest daughter was feeling chatty, a rare phenomenon, and she said, “Hey Mom! I have an idea. What if we created a fall bucket list?! We could put different things on it like choreograph a dance to Thriller, bake pies, go to a pumpkin patch, watch a scary movie, go to a Halloween party…”.
It would have been easy to brush it off and say, “Yea maybe…”, leaving it open-ended and not offering her any kind of validation. I wasn’t going to let this one scurry past me. I stomped on it wholeheartedly.
“Hey, I LOVE that idea! What if we did a hayride or made a fun fall drink? Let’s brainstorm some fun fall ideas!”
She smiled at me and continued to rattle off ideas, both of us feeling suddenly awake and alive.
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