Normal

6 days straight with the people I love most in the world.  It’s nothing short of earth shattering.  To quote one of my favorite movies The Story of Us “And we made them, I mean think about that! It's like there were no people there, and then there were people and they grew.”

We made these babies.  It sounds simple and easy and normal, except that it’s not.  It’s just really not.  What they forget to tell you in baby-class, that Mike would have failed brilliantly if they were actually passing out grades for it,  babies are PEOPLE.  Yes, you heard that right.  They’re people.  They start out all sweet and cooey and they just keep growing.  And it goes in stages.  I think they do it that way so we won’t freak out.  They are tiny and sweet and very mushy adorable like puppies.   And you can just gaze at them for hours and just relish all the love that you feel for them.  And you do what you can.  You read the books.  You are conscientious.  You have bed times and routines.  You read to them.  You are consistent and reliable.  You teach them everything you can.  You pray for them.  You pray with them.  You do almost everything right and then you inevitably screw up some huge major thing.  If you’re lucky, you’re the one that suffers, not them.

You do what you can.  You do your best.  You worry.  You wait.  You listen to them breathing.  You watch them sleeping.  You lose sleep.  You lose patience.  You forget what you came into the room for in the first place.  You forget why you cared at all.  You forgive them.  You forgive yourself.  You begin to feel like you’ve gotten your life back on track.  It’s baby steps really, which is ironic if you think about it.

It’s like that normal you thought you would get back.  You somehow thought how things would be normal again as soon as you just got that baby OUT of your body. Then you thought maybe you’d find normal after she started sleeping through the night.  Then you thought maybe solid foods was the real promised land.  Then it was out of diapers.  Then preschool. Then kindergarten.  And really, all day school, that should have taken us back to normal again, right?

Normal was an illusion.  Had you stayed the same as you were before you found out you were pregnant, you would be about as far from normal as a human can be.  I think being a parent gives you multiple normals. I think that is why it’s so easy to feel like we’re failing.  Odds are pretty good that we’re screwing up something in there.  But it’s all about doing our best an always just trying to do better than we did the day before.  It’s about learning how to be honest with ourselves and honest with our children.  It’s about forgiving.  It’s about letting go. It’s about recognizing that liking ourselves is one of the most important things we can do for our children.  If we don’t like ourselves, how can we possibly expect them to like themselves?  How can we expect them to like us?

There is no magic formula.  There is no special trick.  If we want our children to grow up to be people we can be proud of, then we need to be people they can be proud of.   They need us and we need them.  We all need to be self-sufficient and have our own hopes and dreams.  If we’re lucky, we can use a little bit of that parental influence to see if we can tap into a few mutual preferences and cultivate some interests that we can share.

The babies that came into our lives a decade ago don’t exist anymore.  Neither do the parents that welcomed them.  They have changed us as much as we have changed them.  I can only hope for the best.   Our beautiful babies are now children on the brink of young adulthood.  They are interesting and smart and considerate.  They are brave in their own ways and they are understanding.  They think for themselves and they are conscientious.  They are beautiful from the inside out and that beauty shines in their kindness to others.   As their mother I am proud, but as a fellow human being, I am just grateful to know them.

Six days with them and I like them even more than I did when we left.   There were no people and then there were people.  We had something to do with that.  Maybe it’s just another leg through our journey of normal but tonight it feels like magic.