It was a busy weekend. I spent Saturday preparing food and packing. I left town in the afternoon with a friend and spent the night away. The next morning I ran a half marathon, drove the hour and a half home, saw my kids for about twenty minutes and then headed out to go help a friend with a graduation party. I came back in time to help with bedtime for less than an hour and then headed back to help cleanup before collapsing on the couch.
This morning when the one year old saw me she cried until I picked her up and then she snuggled into my chest and laid there for almost ten minutes. This little girl hardly ever sits still long enough for snuggles, so for a tired mama on a Monday morning this was the greatest gift in the world.
I’m around these little people all day every day. There are a lot of days when I feel “maxed out” as a mother. When I dream of getting away to spend the night in a hotel room alone. When I make grand plans to go on writing retreats and travel overseas and focus on myself as a human being, because my kids need to see that in their mom. Sometimes I look through the classified ads for jobs and daydream about what it would be like to get up and go do work that someone valued enough to pay me for.
And yet, it’s also true that I miss these little people as soon as I leave them and am relieved as soon as I get home.When I go away and do things and come back and my little girl snuggles up on my chest to show me how much she missed me too, I wonder why I feel the need to ever go away.
This work of parenting, it’s holy work at every stage. It is work to carry a tiny human inside your body for nine months. It is work to devote every waking hour to a helpless newborn. It is work to chase a toddler, to listen to hours of an elementary schooler learning to read, to ride the waves of life with a middle schooler. It is work to balance independence and parenting with a teenager. It is work to stand back and let them fly when the time comes.
It is work to hold on and work to let go. It is work to constantly change who you are as a parent to meet each unique stage of parenting. It is such holy, blessed work that we sometimes forget it is work. It is work that is such a privilege to do that we think we are supposed to love every minute of it and never want anything more.
And sometimes I don’t want more. In the moments with my daughter snuggled up on my chest, I am perfectly content to never want anything more ever again.
And then the moment passes. She goes back to playing and I pick up a book and wonder if I’ll ever have the time to write one of my own or if I’ll ever see the places they write about.
This work of parenting, it is holy work. But it is not the only work that is ours to do. There is the work of being human. Of dreaming of bigger and better dreams. Of creating. Of nurturing our souls. Of doing what needs to be done. There is resting and exercising and partnership and being alone. The work of being human is holy, important work, too.
Balancing the work of being a parent and the work of being a human is a kind of work all it’s own. We are taught that we should be happy where we are. That we should be grateful for what we have. A wonderful sentiment, but one that nevertheless implies that wanting “more”–more time for parenting or more time for being human–means that we are not doing a good job being grateful in the moment.
But I think it’s the wanting that makes it possible to be both our best human self and our best parent self. When I am ready to throw my whole heart and soul into parenting, the wanting reminds me not to forget that I am also a human with needs worthy of acknowledgment. When I am honoring my human self, the wanting reminds me that three little pieces of my heart are out there in the world as well, pulling me home.
So today, instead of resisting the wanting, I’m choosing to be grateful for it. Because in the wanting of more is the opportunity to be more.