Just keep swimming...

Tomorrow, my firstborn turns four years old. It's so hard for me to process in some ways -- I still remember her babyhood so clearly -- but at the same time, when I watch my spunky little kid motoring around on her tricycle in the driveway hollering, "Faster, faster!" or listen to her animatedly narrating her day to her daddy I feel a little disoriented. How is this even possible? How is this beautiful little firecracker mine, and where did she come from? How did we get to this point?

And then I look at her baby brother, who is such a completely different child but who also sometimes looks so much like Suzannah did as a baby, if a bit fatter, and my head, it spins.

I had just enough quiet time this afternoon to write in Suzannah's journal, the book I started three years ago today, on the night before her first birthday. Isaac was napping and Suzannah was reading quietly in her room (she has now completely given up napping, although she is fairly cooperative about still having "quiet time" -- so why, why doesn't she sleep any more at night?) and I used that time to write her Birthday Letter. When I started writing in this journal, I managed to do it monthly. Over the past year or so, though, between pregnancy and adding another baby to our family, I mostly just try to write when I can, and lately her letters come every few months. This is just the way it is, juggling two children, and there's no point in beating myself up for it -- someday, when she reads this (I have no idea when this will be, but I'm thinking far, far into the future), I can't believe she will really be all that distressed that there is a letter for February and a letter for May but nothing for March or April the year she was three.

I go back and forth debating how much of that journal to share here. I think I've shared a couple of her birthday letters, but part of me wants to keep her journal between us; it feels a little too intimate to share with the world right now. It's not so much that I'm writing anything I wouldn't write about here, but some things, I think, should be just hers.

I was so thankful for the afternoon quiet today. These moments seem so desperately fleeting lately. As we near lunchtime each day, I begin to plan the ways in which I will maximize my use of naptime. I'll write, or I'll read, or I'll catch up on e-mail, or I'll get the kitchen floor scrubbed, or I'll finish the laundry. In the weeks following Isaac's birth, I was fortunate in that my children fell into a pretty beautiful rhythm of sleeping at the same time for at least a little while, and I usually had one good hour each afternoon. It doesn't seem like much, but that hour was everything. It meant the possibility of a nap, or a clean bathroom, or some uninterrupted writing. Now, though, I can no longer take that quiet time for granted -- Suzannah gets there eventually, but it doesn't always coincide with Isaac's sleep. Sometimes I scrawl a few lines here and there, in the spaces between my children's needs. Sometimes I just power through the day to accomplish what I can. Sometimes I just sit, sometimes I don't really know what I do, because it's like once I have that time, I don't really remember how to use it.

And that, I suppose, is just the season of life that we're in right now. It's teaching me patience, maybe. It's teaching me to notice things when I can, in the quiet spaces between bursts of activity and chaos. It's teaching me how little control I have. And that might actually be a good thing, although it doesn't stop me from struggling with it.

My little girl entered the world on her own terms, almost four weeks early. It's so interesting to me, the ways in which my children's births reflect who they are and who they're becoming -- obviously, I notice this more with Suzannah since I've had more time with her, but I know that as Isaac reveals himself to us over time this will become clearer in ways I can't clearly see right now. We weren't ready, but she was, and we just -- had to dive in and keep up.

Or, as she often sings to me these days, "Just keep swimmin'. Just keep swimmin'." We're going through another Finding Nemo phase in a big way, which is funny because we don't watch the movie much -- but these days she is Nemo, and I am Dory, and Matt is Marlin, and Isaac is Baby Nemo Isaac. Other people in our lives (Aaron and Morgan, Kyanne, etc.) are turtles or sharks.

Just keep swimmin'. What do we do? We swim.

Or she'll look at us after we've warned her about something -- like shimmying up on the seat of the exercise bike, or hurling herself off the couch because she wants to "slide," or jumping from the stools at the kitchen counter, so confident one of us will catch her whether we're ready or not -- and she'll say, "That's what I do." Indeed.

On one hand, she's a fairly cautious child. She doesn't warm up instantly to strangers. She's not inherently outgoing. She still wants and needs the security of Daddy sitting with her during Sunday School -- sometimes on his lap. But once she's made you her person, once she's connected with you enough to be comfortable, enough to be silly, enough to tease, she becomes wildly gleeful and affectionate. Once she's mastered something at the playground, she throws herself at it with such carefree abandon. In January, when I began walking to the playground with the kids on sunny days, Suzannah was shy about climbing up to the top of the big slide. She slid down with her legs hugging the sides, slowing her movement. At the mall play area, she's always let herself be a little bulldozed by bigger, wilder kids. But now that I've always got her brother on me I can't quite follow her everywhere she wants to go, so she's had to learn how to hold her own among the older kids. If she wants to play up in the treehouse at REI, she has to go it alone -- I can't very well crawl up there and follow her across the little bridge and down the slide with an infant strapped to me. And there was a turning point in the last couple of months when she just decided to go for it. She spent some time at the top, shrinking back into a corner as children much older and larger flew past, but I couldn't go up after her; she couldn't slide down in the safety of my arms. She made that leap herself, and the grin on her face as she came shooting out at the bottom made me so. proud.

She does just fine at the mall play area now. She does just fine at the playground. She'll run around and laugh and holler with kids she doesn't know, and she'll climb to the top of a slide, or hoist herself up on a swing, and she'll cry, "Mommy! Look at me!"

This afternoon she rode her tricycle in the driveway. She pedals hard ("Faster, faster!") and just before she reaches the street, she turns (all by herself, now, and without slowing down at all) and heads back to the garage, grinning, shrieking. And then the inevitable happened; she didn't look where she was going and pedaled too close to the basketball hoop. The back wheels on her trike caught the base and she toppled over, skinning her elbow and her knee, landing on her hand.

She picked herself up, brushed her hands on her pants. I waited, not rushing over to soothe in case she didn't need it, knowing that my reaction could mean the difference between dissolving in tears and shaking it off.

"Whoops!" I said cheerfully. "You okay, Bug?"

"Mommy, can you kiss it, please?" she asked, her voice quavering. She held out her hand. And I kissed her palm, kissed her elbow, kissed her knee through the fabric of her pants.

"All better?"

"Thank you, Mommy," she said.

"Want to take a little break, Kiddo?"

"Nope," she replied. "Can we please try it again?"

And in that instant I was absolutely overcome by everything contained in those words. Because every single day, I have to try again. Because this motherhood thing is hard, hard in ways I never could have imagined four years ago. Because sometimes -- often -- my heart feels like the emotional equivalent of her skinned knees and elbows. Sometimes I don't want to get back on the tricycle; I want to go inside and sink to my knees and cry and quit. I want someone to kiss it all away, but instead I have to take a deep breath and remember that I set the tone for my home, for our day, and I have to let go of the morning's tantrums and yesterday's battles and start fresh. Sometimes I have to ask for forgiveness from my daughter when I fall short, when I lose my temper, when I am so far from the mother I want to be, and those are, perhaps, among the most humbling moments I'll ever experience.

So we try again, and we keep swimming.

And I'm just so filled with gratitude for the chance to swim with this child.

Happy Birthday, Baby Girl. I'm so glad I get to be your mother.