He isn't 5 for another 16 days but he's already shed all of his babyness and is a full blown "kid". He grew a full two inches taller since January. I can barely carry him anymore with his long legs all dangly and getting tangled up in mine. He likes privacy in the bathroom now. He makes fart jokes. He reads street signs and labels and instructions (but only when he wants to), he can look at the calendar and know how many days are left in the week or the month. When we go to the doctor for check ups, he walks right up and gives his name and date of birth to the receptionist. When he laughs, it is a wild, full bellied, bent over double kind of laugh. His arm will be in a cast for another 4 weeks but he's already riding his scooter and running down trails and playing mini-golf...because he isn't a baby, he's a boy. He made his own peanut butter sandwich the other day.
I thought that I would be ready for this. I thought that I was just holding on for this exact moment when he didn't need me so much and wasn't sucking the soul out of me with his demands. I thought that I just couldn't wait until he was a real kid and not a baby... but it happened so quickly. I think it happened when I blinked. I might need to avoid blinking for awhile - I don't want to blink and find out he's driving the car and is taller than me. It feels like it could happen that way.
I started this blog as a written journey of what it was like to give up my full time job and stay at home with this wild boy. I thought it would be about saving his spirit, about his journey through a trauma back into wholeness. I didn't have a plan for what to do with it after G was well and whole. I never even wrote as much as I meant to from the start! I also didn't plan that it was going to be about my own journey. I didn't even realize I had a journey to go through. I was so fully unprepared to embark on a journey of my own, that just like I blinked and found my baby had turned into a boy, I blinked and found myself right in the middle of a life I didn't know I was going to be in, how I got here, or where I'm supposed to go next. One day I was in Hawaii on vacation with my child, and a week later I was sitting in a vast wilderness of complicated emotions and trauma and brokenness all of my own.
I try to focus on how the universe brings balance to my life in so many ways. I feel like its just how my life has been cared for by God (or whatever universal vibe you might want to call it). Suddenly though, I was smack dab in a place where all the balance had shifted in such a way that it left me spinning, sideways, tipped over, and most definitely unbalanced. A friend told me some theories show that the universe tends toward chaos and that maintaining order (or balance) actually requires effort. Huh. I had to ponder that one for awhile. It makes sense that to create balance you might have to put forth energy to offset the chaos, but I've always felt that the balance occurring in my life was a gift for me to embrace. Then I blinked.
I'm a little lost right now, a little adrift, and trying to look for balance, or to create my own balance even. I have another thought though; maybe I'm approaching it wrong. Maybe its not so much about trying to find or create balance, but about allowing time to pass and shift and for the balance to occur on it's own. Possibly I've become a little too used to things happening when I want them too, or when I make them happen, and not enough accustomed to waiting it out. There is a lesson there, I just have to pay attention to it. I'll try not to blink and miss it.
No comments:
Post a Comment