One day, when I look back on this time of raising four young children, I hope I remember how often strangers said these two phrases to me, “Wow. You’ve really got your hands full” and “Enjoy these years. They go by in the blink of an eye.”
Usually the stranger is saying this while I am a) holding at least one child, who does not want to be held, and who is wriggling to run free around the busy parking lot or b) deep in a tense moment of a child having a public meltdown or wetting themselves or throwing up.
These phrases are a paradox of being literally true and feeling so very untrue.
Example: when a stranger states the obvious that, yes, my hands are full of a wrestling kid, I can’t help but agree. I also want to reply, “Yes. My hands are full. Perhaps you’d like to take a turn at holding these forty pounds of wriggling child before they dodge out in front of that speeding bus they have their eye on?”
As true as the first statement is, the second is not. These years, actually, don’t seem to be passing in the blink of an eye, especially those particular moments when I’m trying to clean up puke from the check-out line floor with my sleeve.
But that’s another blog post.
Today is, actually, about how fast life is moving this week. Like, very fast. Everything has seemed to happen in the blink of an eye. Like in the picture of Sam and Elisabeth, this week has been a wild ride. Which is nice once in a while.
Examples…
…on Tuesday, a friend offered us Mumford and Sons tickets for a crazy low pre-sale price. The whole transaction took a whole bunch of phone calls and texts and back-and-forth. But, in the blink of an eye, we had fourth row tickets.
…yesterday I went to Healing Prayer at Serenity Retreat. When I was leaving, the prayer minister offered me tickets to a dinner with Eric Metaxes. To be clear, the dinner is a benefit-gala thing, and not actually just me and Eric eating burgers together and chatting about Bonhoeffer.
…we bought a house. More on this later, because the story is so fun. Bu the whole, “did we get it, did we not” happened in the blink of an eye.
It just goes to show that (in the words of Ferris Bueller), “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in awhile, you could miss it.”
Which, in the case of public puking, would probably be okay.
Public puking is the worst. So embarrassing. I feel like every [old] person is looking at you, judging you for bringing a sick kids out in public, when we all know that either a. you didn’t know said kid was sick, or b. You had absolutely no choice in the matter.