Look at how grown up she is.
Parenting is both an endless allelujia (credit to Newman and Hank for my favorite Christmas card message ever, ever, ever) and an endless goodbye. Every single day I wrestle with my fears about the passage of time, my anxieties about failing to make the most of this one life I have.
Grace informed me tonight that there are only 10 more days of Beginners. Somehow this just causes cracks inside, brings tears to my eyes. There is something about Beginners: my first child in her first year of “real school.” We are beginning. We are almost at the end of being beginners. This brings to mind, naturally, that marvelously bittersweet and neatly poetic quote by Churchill:
This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end.
But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
I so often felt the heavy drag of sad times as a kid and the fleetingness of good times, yet I am not all that certain that anything is the one and only… even this particular life.
Parenting represents such sweet years in life, but I have been learning from those I know in their 80s and noticing that some of the folks that inspire me (my mom, included, lately) are finding great pleasure in just being. so often it turns out that the fear of things (even aging and loss) exceeds the pain of what we feared.
I have a very strong sense that every stage is going to astound you with how much better, cuter, dazzling and moving all of our kids are as they continue to evolve and grow.
One thing reads for sure in you’re writing—nothing is passing you by unlived or unfelt—in this way you will never look back with regret.