Grow

Because the world goes on.

A great deal has been written about the performance of motherhood on social media, but there is one trend I’ve been thinking about constantly. I am bombarded daily with content reminding me how brief and fleeting the seasons of babyhood and childhood are. Reminding me to have #gratitude, reminding me I will miss it. One post starts with “Nobody prepares you for when…” followed by a saccharine description of tiny baby hands maturing into adolescent hands, and I thought actually, everyone prepares you. Pre-nostalgia seems to be the dominant emotion among parents of young children these days, and I believe it’s sincere, unlike so much other content about motherhood. Perhaps the truest thing about parenting in our generation is the precarity that underscores it. Other periods throughout history have been similarly tinged with danger, but not perhaps by a sense of doom. That comes with the onslaught of information about all the things we can’t depend on, with the moment-to-moment calculus of how and when and whether to resist, about the moral algebra of living that afflicts all thinking people.

And here’s the thing about pre-nostalgia content: it’s true. I do believe the dramatic vocabulary deployed to describe it-heartbreak, grief, loss-accurately describes what so many experience. It should not be heartbreaking to witness an eight month old finally sleep independently, or to realize a seven year old has not called you in to wash their hair in a year. It should be a joy so mundane that it’s only acknowledged in old age, but our generation is living every era of our lives all at once-foresight and hindsight colliding in the noisy soup of our collective consciousness.

Consider the everyday viscera of living as a caregiver of any sort. The small, hot, unwieldy mess of it. The sacred practice and boredom of it. The child arching her back as you hold her, your aching elbow or stiff shoulder. When I am overwhelmed, which is often nowadays, I take comfort in my own animal experience, knowing that cats and turtles and wrens share in this practice. Knowing that children will grow up and I will grow old, and that somehow in spite of it all, grass will still force itself through cracks in the sidewalk. There is something in the something that wants to keep on living, and I want to be of it and from it.