The parenting cliches begin even before you make the pregnancy announcement. “It’ll go by fast,” they say. “Sleep when your baby sleeps.” “Enjoy every minute.” “Take care of yourself too.” Then the baby arrives and life’s a blur for a while. You learn a few tricks - keep the spit-up rags close by, extra diapers in the car.
Some of the advice is helpful and some of it is indeed cliche, but you take a little of what you learn, a little from what others tell you, and begin to mesh together a picture of parenting. Your child begins to morph daily into someone taller, someone older. And that parenting ideal shifts with each new transformation.
It’s easy to forget. After all, change isn’t always welcome.
This week, Nate and I got out a rarely-used toy: his felt board set. After a few minutes, I realized that he had organized everything by color and shape, making careful stacks of each variety. This was new, untaught. I think he was excited as I was, seeing the towers of red squares and white triangles. “It goes there!”
He understands shapes. This is beautiful to me.
My husband and I have been singing the Alphabet Song to introduce letters. Last night in the car, Nate told us what came next when we stopped in the middle. He understands his ABCs. Again, this is beautiful to me.
Yesterday, I picked up some tools and hardware after finishing some minor repairs. “Screwdrivers poke eyes out. Hurt,” he told me, echoing his father’s months-ago warning to not play with the tools. He (sometimes) understands safety information. Here, too, is beauty.
The transformation from toddler to child is happening right in front of me. I facilitate the change, of course, by feeding him vegetables and peanut butter sandwiches, and teaching him not to run into the street. These are the basics, and I don’t think much about them.
But when he finishes a section of the alphabet on his own, that’s when I see the full form of the change taking place. It’s the cliched-but-still-true lightbulb moment that tells me that life is always moving.
I like the constantly new boy that I live with - he’s fun, energetic, and very cute. Presence in the present moments, looking forward to the changes, shifts, and milestones - this seems to be the very truest of parenting of cliches. It will change, and oh, how bittersweet it is.