Mama, you're not going to miss this

A guest post by Andrea Holme

Photo by Bethany Beck on Unsplash

You won’t miss the middle of the night feedings and diaper changes, the unsolicited advice, the comments on the name you chose. You won’t miss “oh, so cute, is it a boy or a girl?” You won’t miss the confusion that has replaced all your instincts to understand human nonverbal communication once you are left alone with a tiny person whose only word is a guttural WAAAAAAAAH.

You’re not going to miss cluster feedings or sleep regressions. You won’t miss the times when you thought you’d be fine without the extra outfit and were very, very wrong. You won’t miss monitoring milestones and comparing your child’s progress as if the date of their first step is a competition to be won. You won’t miss the days of following your suddenly mobile person around, asking, “what is in your mouth/hand/onesie?”

You won’t miss the loneliness you experience when your world shrinks to encompass their needs. You won’t miss the arguments with a co-parent over discipline issues or budget (or the spectacular grief of having no input on your decisions at all).

You won’t miss wondering when your world will expand again to include YOUR needs.

You won’t miss potty training or staying in their rooms (or beds!) until they fall asleep, and you absolutely won’t miss the neck and back aches that come from bending your body into positions to accommodate their tiny mattresses or ultra short potty chairs.

You won’t miss the internal battle between reality and your ideals of what life would look like, meals would look like, home and rest and going out in public would look like. You won’t miss offering foods and insisting they take xx number of bites before yielding to this week’s Top Three Foods Precious Will Eat.

You won’t miss sight words or math problems that are definitely being taught very differently from the way you learned. You won’t miss parent-teacher conferences or class Valentine’s Day parties or Spirit Weeks. You won’t miss all the phone calls and emails it takes just to get an appointment to try to get ANSWERS.

You won’t miss the mad dash to sign up for a summer program, nor will you miss “we’ll figure out how to pay for it later.”

You won’t miss the worries that grow with your child, exceeding their height, exceeding your own. You won’t miss sending multiple texts just to get an annoyed “k.” in response. You won’t miss sitting up late, waiting for a return, dreading a call, deciding whether to be angry if curfew is missed or relieved that they made it home safely. You won’t miss the arguments over showers or laundry or what on earth happened to all of our forks (a mystery that will never be solved, I’m afraid). You won’t miss calculating the number of places to go divided by the number of available drivers on any given weekend.

Older moms often say, “You’ll miss this when they’re older,” and we mean well. We’ve forgotten what it’s like for miniscule moments to dominate our days, how easily real frustrations can be minimized with a thoughtless phrase. We don’t mean to do that; we’re just repeating what other experienced moms said to us. It felt off to us at the time, but we didn’t have the nervous system regulation tools to push back on it yet. Good for you, keep building that toolbox.

When we say, “You’ll miss this when they’re older,” we mean you’ll miss the nostalgic things we miss – the smell of baby shampoo and gentle laundry soap, the sweet sound and feel of a sleeping baby’s breath on your cheek, the new discoveries every day of the toddler and preschool years. We miss knock-knock jokes, dinosaur books, and tea parties and the first time meeting Anne Shirley and Diana Barry. We miss being the first person they tell all their important news to, all the time. We miss being the last person they want to speak to every night.

And if pressed, we, the older moms in my middle-ish forties age range, may be willing to admit that not all of motherhood was what we expected. Life doesn’t deliver on every dream. And every parent has a stretch where they feel like they might need someone else to sub in for a bit. Parenting feels like a bait-and-switch – with no refund.

For me, it was in the middle school to early high school years, for both of my daughters. From about 13 and a half to 16, neither of them liked me very much, and neither was shy about letting me know. I was tired and angry and trying to be polite and brave-faced in public. I felt like I couldn’t talk about the reality of my at-home life.

My children slammed doors, lied to me, stared at me defiantly without saying a word, told me very true things about myself that I didn’t like hearing. I don’t miss those days.

On the other hand, I’m glad I didn’t miss those days. We built trust between the three of us, even in our conflicts. We learned to tease apart which parts of our arguments were driven by being a teenager and a tired mom, and which parts were real issues to be resolved. It took time to learn how to relate to each other.

Life brought us changes we couldn’t predict. Those changes didn’t cause these conflicts, but they limited my time and energy to deal with them. As I look back, I can see that even though I couldn’t be there every second the way I hoped I would when I brought them home from the hospital, as far as they’re concerned, I didn’t miss anything. None of the time I spent fighting for their growth and their good was wasted.

I didn’t miss the glimpses of who my little girls used to be; of the women they ‘re becoming.

I didn’t miss the times when they saw through MY pain and said exactly the words I needed to hear. I didn’t miss when they said, “Mom, it’s okay for you to cry. You don’t have to be strong for us all the time.”

I didn’t miss when they transitioned through their own hard times and let me start comforting, coaching, counseling them again.

As they transitioned out of their own difficult years, I didn’t miss the spa nights with foaming cloud masks and picking out fun nail polish colors and dancing in the living room to the music that used to make them cringe. I didn’t miss the spots of joy, slowly growing in the space left by those hard times.

And you won’t miss the joys, either. Unless you are living in a 1980s movie where your career focus is a major plot device creating the conflict that can only be resolved by finally going to your child’s baseball game, you won’t miss it.

You won’t miss wondering if you could have done things differently, and you won’t miss their assurances of, “No, Mom, we know you did the best you could.” “Mom, we always knew you loved us.” “Mom, I don’t know where I’d be without you.”

You won’t miss graduations or proms, helping them study for tests, dreaming about what they want to be when they grow up. You won’t miss the first tooth or the first lost tooth, the first tricycle ride and scraped knee. You won’t miss the first toddling steps or the moment they reach out their hands to mimic you as you say, “SOOOOOO BIG.”

You won’t miss it.

No matter what, I believe you will be there for as many of those big little moments as you can. You will make every effort to be present, and you will show what it looks like to reach your limit and still be loving. You will find yourself again and let the people you love most know who YOU are. You will see your children growing into the people they are destined to become – and discover again how much you truly like them.

And one day you will look back and know that what you witnessed was enough.

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Andrea Holme is a mom of two young adults who keep her cool-adjacent. Avidly indoorsy, she can be found crafting with words or yarn, with an audiobook in her ears. She writes to remind herself and her friends that life is more than what we see, every day contains beauty, and hope is God’s most gracious gift. You can read her Substack at Andrea Holme and follow her on Instagram.

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