Hammond's Barrel of Monkeys: Grasping at Waterfalls

Last week, as part of my volunteer work, the kids and I drove a man with disabilities from his workplace to his home. He marveled at my good fortune in having young children. I was of course tempted to say, "Are you kidding?! This gig is plain insanity most of the time." But I took a moment and replied, "Well, it's a lot of work, but it is pretty amazing to see the world through their eyes."

For example, my husband and I have both noticed how fascinated our youngest daughter is with the water at bath time, especially as we fill the tub. She grabs for the water as it comes out of the faucet, and then seeing that her hands are still empty, she bends over to the drain cover and scrambles for fistfuls of water, not understanding why it just slips away. She can see it, but she can't seem to keep it.

My grandma always says that when you're raising children the hours are long, but the years fly by. Nothing could be more true. So much of what we moms and dads do in parenting young children appears to be within a stationery point in time and space. Nothing changes. The kids awaken and need breakfast, they need to get chased out of jammies and into clothes, and they want to test all the same limits as they did yesterday with mostly the same tactics as if they will get a better result. And I try mostly the same tactics in return, engaging in this pursuit of insanity in a sort of comical dance that only looks funny to parents who have "been there." (Everyone else thinks, “Who in their right mind would have kids?” or, for those just asking for trouble, they think,“I will never do that with my kids.”) And even if the reality is that I am moving through space at over a million miles per hour, it can feel like I am standing still.

Instead of time flowing like water from a spout, the repetitive part of parenting is more like the slow movement of not-quite-solid glass in antique windows. Over what feels like centuries, you start to notice that something has changed. [I just read that this explanation for why antique windows are thicker on bottom than on the top is a myth.]

It's the moments I want to capture forever with my kids--the snuggles and deep insights they share just before lights-out, their brilliant questions that interrupt my loud thoughts while I'm doing housework, or the delightful antics they invent because they think it's time to get along with each other now that Mom isn't looking--those are the moments that flow faster than I can catch them. I try to catch them, of course--and look as ridiculous as my toddler snatching at water--by snapping photos now and then, writing down brief memories and milestones in their journals, or telling myself, "I will always remember this moment." At times it's easy to conclude that my hands keep coming up empty since those moments just slip away. Where does the time go?

I remember as a child returning to school at the close of summer and thinking, "In just a moment, it will be the last day of school, and I'll be saying, ‘Just a moment ago, it was the first day of school.’" And although the intervening months were full of challenges, surprises, growth and losses, I would always land on the last day of school, saying, "Wow, just a moment ago, it was the first day of school!" It was as if I had scaled a tall mountain and could see myself over on another high peak that marked the first day of the school year. All the valleys and peaks between us now seemed inconsequential. I gave myself a reassuring wave to say, "Look, you were right! You’ll be here in just a moment!"

I imagine my future self (without little kids) on a distant mountain, looking back at my present self, the Elissa with head down and trudging through snow, wondering if I'm making any progress, wondering if all my work is making any difference, or if I'm just on some treadmill covered in snow. I cannot hear her, but I have a feeling future Elissa is not just saying, "See, you made it! Those rotten kids finally grew up!" She's saying, "Keep going! You're not alone on your journey!" And as I imagine her looking back at me, my head spins with the dizzying heights and distances we've traversed.

It's easy to think, "If I keep encountering the same obstacles, I must not be making progress." The fighting, blaming, foot-stomping, yelling--and I'm not talking about the kids--can really bog me down. I feel like the mythical glass slowly moving down the window. I previously imagined that if given enough time and opportunities to improve, simply by wanting to improve, I would. But I'm not just some graph with the y-axis showing my improvement and the x-axis showing the constant of time. I'm starting to see that time is itself not always constant (the longest hour is just before Dad gets home). And improvement in parenting isn't something I can easily measure.

Hope is the constant. Hope makes the difference between time passing so the kids eventually grow up versus really knowing I tried my best with them during this time-limited journey. No matter how many times I encounter the same issue, I will reach for some humor, some perspective, some creativity. Sometimes all I come up with are the tactics I would like to be rid of; but always there is hope, if I will see it, whether through the veil of surging water or the slowly flowing glass, hope is there.

Right now my hope is that with time flying so fast, maybe the slow, thick moments of parenting--that stuff that never seems to change--well, I hope that maybe it is part of what is holding us all together. Perhaps the constant of hope takes that gunk and makes it useful. It prevents this rapid movement through time from just making us slip away from each other.

Monotonous mayhem, the glue that holds us together.

Here are a few examples of how I have tried to grasp a waterfall the past few months. I don't usually remember to take photos of the gunk.

Admiring the view at Rocky Mountain National Park. By the time we got to the alpine zone, it was snowing! Thank you, Grandma Coral and Grandpa Alan for visiting us and giving us an excuse to finally visit this beauty!