In the next twenty years my little boys are going to grow up into men.
It is a fact that sometimes keeps me up at night staring at the ceiling while my mind races. Twenty years, that’s it. When I think about my boys growing up, especially as Evan’s birthday fast approaches, twenty years feels like the blink of an eye. It’s jsut a little less than I’ve been alive, and a little more than how old I feel most days. Yet it’s all that is needed for them to go from crawling across my floor to driving away into their own lives. They’ll be adults. Oh that thought kills me some days.
The world is a scary place. Wars, drugs, pollution, politics, the list of things that I wish I could keep them from goes on forever. And every day I read the news and add a few more things to the list of what I hope they never experience. Just twenty little years. That’s all I’ve got to wrap them in a cocoon of maternal safety. To hopefully teach them right from wrong, to help them see things for what they really are, and to build them up into the kind of people that can withstand what life tosses at them.
There are those moments when I look forward to twenty years passing by. I’ll have my house back, my life back, the reign of my mini-dictators will be at an end. Dearest is just looking forward to walking through the house naked and early morning sex that isn’t interrupted by someone calling “mommy!”. Yet there is still this fear. I don’t want my kids to experience half the things I have, but I’m almost certain that they’ll probably have twice as many moments by the time they are my age.
So twenty years, that’s it. Then my babies will have grown into adults, hopefully not in need of too much therapy. And I’ll be grey haired and wrinkled and hoping that I made the right choices with the time I had.
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This post is for the March Write Away contest hosted at Scribbit.
Tags: parenting, children, life, growing up, Write Away contest
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March 4th, 2008 at 10:05 pm
Oh I can relate to those “I can’t sleep because I’m worrying” nights! I’d like to hope it means we’re good and caring mothers, right?
Life is so scary sometimes, I can so see what you mean.
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March 4th, 2008 at 10:28 pm
What a good post. I almost always have these thoughts just as I finally get into bed at night. I think, NO!!! I’m simply not going to let them get any older than they are now. It’s so unfair that they grow up.
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