Dear Time,
I don't know what to tell you. Sometimes it seems as though we are here for an eternity and sometimes the moments are so fleeting, I cannot understand how they've slipped away? I may be more emotional than most, I'm just now understanding that I am a 9 on the Enneagram, but it certainly describes me as close to a "t" as possible. Some days I wonder how I'm not the third grade girl who decided to cut her bangs and ended up with spikes resembling my now first grade son.
I often gaze at him and am awe struck at the fact that he is turning seven next month and when I closed my eyes at last slumber my thirteen year old was exactly his age. My body has aged, my mind a bit wiser, but my soul bursts at the seams as if I were a child.
It is so difficult some days to understand my purpose here, tears well up in my eyes for the ones I've loved and lost both family and friends. I grapple with the day that I too will one day not be in the here and now. I love strongly and deeply and Lord knows, I am loyal to the bitter end.
I love my husband and children fiercely and yet I often feel as though I fall short. I want them to know that they are the center of my universe just after God, even when I don't always show it.
As I age, less is more. We could try and keep up with the Joneses, but for what? It's nice to have nice things, but what are things at the end of the day? Again, I go back to the 70s wall hanging my parents had in our kitchen..."the best things in life aren't things". I've gotten caught up in the material world like the next girl, I lament over the home improvement projects we have half begun, the projects we need to complete, but at the end of the day what matters most is that we have each other.
Dear Time,
I wish you would slow down as this is my last year to have children in two schools. Next year, I will have two in elementary, one in middle school, and one in high school. Lord, help me! Someone forgot to tell me that this would happen. I wasn't thinking about this at all when Kieran was 6 and Liam was born. Plenty of moms with four or more do this and I know I will pull through, but holy crap. I'm not ready, so I'll tell myself what I tell my kids-we're not there yet, let's just do today!
Dear Time,
As perplexed as I am as to how I arrived to this point in life, I am grateful to you each and every day to wake up and have another one. I am more grateful the next second you tick than the last as you have been good to me through the good and the bad.
Dear Time,
Thank you for all that you have been, all that you are and all that you have yet to be. I've learned so many lessons along the way. Some days I wish I could go back to being a child, others to when it was just me and Erik or the days when we were parents for the very first time. In transparency, the rollercoaster isn't one I've always wanted to be on, some days are most definitely harder than others. Without you though, we would not have the story we have now.
Dear Time,
You know I'm a photo girl and I'll sob like there's no tomorrow when my mind says my babies were just born and the lens shows me that they are 6 (turning 7), 8 (turning 9), 11 and 13. Sometimes you are difficult to get along with and other times I'm amazed at how grown and beautiful they are and the future changes that will be.
Dear Sweet Babies,
Time is precious in every way. Make every day count and even on the ones that you would assume forget, know that they are part of your story, part of your journey that makes you who you are.
I love you all, to the end of time.
