Once a Mommy, Always a Mommy

I was all set on having a great Saturday. You know, getting out of bed without an annoying alarm telling me I had to, coffee on the porch, pancakes and bacon with Leo, the sunshine, the breeze, and a wide-open schedule.

Then I got some attitude from a pre-teen boy and I realized he is closer to teen than not, and maybe I didn't have to tell him how to pack a suitcase for a week away to spend with my sister and her family. He is going there to help babysit her two boys and he's probably thinking I am babying him and I just need to back off.

BUT I"M THE MOM!!! Can't one of my kids still call me "Mommy"?

I don't know if I'm ready for this.
I am ready for this. Think: quiet mornings and coffee on the porch....
Or not.

Ryan is my baby. Maybe it's always the hardest with the baby of the family. Maybe I'm weird. I love the relationships I have with all of my older ones, like coffee dates with Adrienne, Sunday afternoon lunches and laziness with Aaron and Lisa-Anna, random hugs and spiritual conversations with Amy, Celtic Thunder concerts with Heather....these weren't things we did when they were 12, 11, 7, 5 and 1.  So why am I feeling so keenly some days, this loss of childhood?

(Ummm...ignore the date. It wasn't January.)

Back then, they didn't drink coffee, Sunday afternoons were spent jumping on the trampoline, and you couldn't go to concerts or the theater and experience it in the same way. Deep conversations involved how to make frog legs palatable, how to build a better campfire, why doing dishes builds character and why cleaning your room gives you even more depth (or maybe it was the depth of the piles of laundry that were discussed...I don't remember...it's all such a blur now).

It really does go by in a blur. A blur of burp cloths, Dreft laundry detergent, pink saddle shoes, big t-shirts as bedtime shirts, dress-up clothes in calico, sequins and tulle, tents in the yard, camp-outs in the living room, noisy times around the table, sticky hugs from popsicle-dripped kids,  found scraps of paper with scribbled maps, hay houses, piled-up kids on the bed for a story from the Bedtime Anytime Storybook, Veggie-Tales,  Mother Goose, The Donut Man and Little Bear at midnight with a sick child....it's a blur that is as colorful as a rainbow and just as fleeting.

And now my baby is going to be 13 in September. And he is leaving for a week and I am already missing him. He comes to me every morning for a hug and I like that routine. It should've had his height tattooed on my person, like how you'd put it on your wall; with every passing year, the top of his head gets just a little bit higher and I don't want to forget.

Okay, maybe I am weird. And I don't really like needles. Never mind. It's just all this nostalgia is making my brain mushy. But, it's a good mushy. I like remembering. I like that I have memories that I can pull out every so often and ponder. And I know that today will someday be a memory that I'll treasure too.

But, if any of my kids reads this, it's okay to every once in a while, let a "Mommy" slip out.
Oh, and my Saturday? It turned out to be a really good day, nostalgia and all.

Love,
Dianne