I just had an out-of-body experience while doing the most mundane thing: microwaving Stouffers macaroni and cheese and two Hebrew National 97 percent fat-free hot dogs.
I was making lunch for Lucy, and she was following me around the kitchen like my shadow, like she was Tails and I was Sonic the Hedgehog. She does this a lot—trailing my every move so that I can’t take a step in either direction, from one split-second to the other, without her immediately getting underfoot.
It turns out that she was particularly clingy because there was a bug on the outside of the screen on the window above our sink and she needed reassurance that he wasn’t going to crawl up her leg and tickle her. I was just as glad as she was that the bug was outside because, unfortunately, killing wayward bugs comes with the territory on this mom gig. It doesn’t seem like all that long ago that I needed bugs killed for me.
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Anyway, I found myself purposefully but also absentmindedly walking around the kitchen from the fridge to the cupboard for a dish to the pantry for the Saran Wrap to the microwave, making the same barely nutritious meal that I’ve I made for Lucy a hundred times before, when suddenly it hit me: I had indeed made that meal a hundred times before. Because I’m a parent…to a 3-year-old…and also a 1-year-old.
Every once in a while, this fact hits me out of nowhere and blows my mind. It’s not like I don’t always know it, but sometimes it becomes starkly true in the oddest moments. You mean to tell me that I’m responsible for two other people, who are smaller than me and need their parents—of which I am one—to do everything for them? When did that happen? When did I stop being a kid myself?
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I remember my mom telling me that she felt like she turned 25 or 27 or some pre-30 age like that and then felt like she stayed the same age inside from then on; it was just all the external stuff that kept on aging without her. I think I’m finally starting to understand what she meant, because it seems like it was just yesterday that she was killing bugs and cooking lunch for me and suddenly I’m doing it for her grandchildren.
