....For the rest of my life?
Yesterday, Mr J. looked at Miss E out of the blue and said, "I think I'd like to marry you." The ever logical Miss E immediately explained how brothers don't marry sisters. Mr J looked even more crushed than Miss E could take, so she backed off the logic and agreed that they could get 'imaginary married'. Then she realized she had a problem: she has two brothers and couldn't possibly choose between them. I suggested that if they were in an imaginary world where siblings could marry, then it might as well be a world where they could marry as many as they wanted, too. Phew. Crisis averted.
Turns out, Mr. A proposed to Miss K anyway.
After lunch, I was scurrying around, trying to put our house back in a semblance of clean, when Miss K came out and politely demanded my attention in the bedroom. I could tell that she had something up her sleeve that was far more exciting than dry-mopping crumbs off the kitchen floor, so I put the mop aside and followed.
In giving up the mop, I found a treasure.
They'd dimmed the lights, put on piano music, and started dancing - as couples. Miss K and Mr A were valiantly attempting to overcome the height difference, while Miss E and Mr J were just barely holding back from breaking into some serious rock-n-roll moves. Truly, though, each little couple was calmly swaying, holding hands, to the music, and suddenly I could see eight, ten, fifteen, twenty years down the road.
Cue throat lump.
Suddenly in that dim light, with the soft piano music, their room turned into a real dance floor, and my sweet babies were dancing with each other not at their pretend weddings, but at the real weddings of one another. And they weren't mine to have and hold anymore; they were on to start their own families, their own lives. Our life as a family of six was a memory.
It's what I pray for and hope for, that they will be adult friends in addition to childhood siblings. It's the blink-of-an-eye time lapse that gets me, though. If the next eight years pass as fast as the previous eight have, then we'll be in the midst of the exhilarating and painful season of launching these sweet people out into the world. All we'll have done is blink.
In going over the most 'recent' posts on this blog, I realized I've not posted since Mr A had both his front teeth intact! These past years have not been easy, and it's hard to reconcile the length of the minutes and hours of some schooldays with the blink-of-an-eye way the years have gone.
It wasn't easy helping a baby adjust to another baby at home; it wasn't easy when the "older baby" went through years - yes, years - of night terrors while the "younger baby" was concurrently teething and mama was going through her fifth round of post-partum depression. For a year, there were two matresses flopped on the floor of a tiny room because we could not justify the cost involved in a toddler bunk bed that would be used for a year and a half; there were months of Mike and I meeting each other in the hallways at 2 a.m. looking and acting more like zombies than humans. There were years of no dates because even a movie night in was too taxing on our sleep deprived bodies. But these same years were when we would peek into their room to check on them and find them curled in each other's arms, or holding hands. They were years of seeing a friendship like none other develop between two tiny men. They were years I'd trade for nothing, no matter how much I now appreciate my sleep (which I get most nights) and our date nights in.
These haven't been easy years with our girls, either. They've entered ages where it's been a struggle to decide how much I can share of their stories because that's what they are: their stories. Not mine. Some weeks and months we had so much struggle that there wasn't much to share if I wasn't going to share deeply painful parts of their childhoods. These days, I think I can tentatively share that it is not easy to be a person who learns differently than most. Teaching very intelligent, right-brained, incredibly intense children is an entirely different ballgame than what I thought I had signed up for when it became clear that God was calling us to have our kids at home for school. If it's been a process for me as the parent and teacher to come to an understanding of this, it's been all that much more of a process for the girls themselves to understand. For the most part, they do now, and we do now, too. The way we live - the way I teach - the way they learn - it doesn't have to be right for anyone else, but it is now, finally, right for us.
It takes my breath away to know how quickly this imaginary wedding dance will fade. So, for right now, I am going to hold onto this ten year old who still holds my hand, even in public; this eight year old who cannot breathe if she is not drawing and chewing gum and who fears so much others' disappointment in her; this four year old who is going to save the world, or at least, for sure, his mommy; and this three year old who goes to sleep murmuring, "Mommy, you are the sweetest girl in the whole wide world."
