Living in the Blink

DISCLAIMER: No, this isn't turning into a sappy blog. I promise. It's just that ...

It's Friday evening and everyone in my household is gone except for me, and I ate too much dessert and am likely PMSing so I'm sitting here on my couch like an absolute lump, all up in my feelings. I tried watching TikToks but damn it why does the algorithm know exactly what will throw me into a tailspin?! Especially when I'm hormonal and overstuffed?!

"It's been said that you will spend the majority of your life knowing your children as adults," said the guy from the TikTok video in question. "But for a brief moment, a blink really, you get to know them as children." He talks about how when they're little, you carry them on your hip and watch them sleep and you're the center of their world ... and then how quickly you realize all that is over. "So if you're tired — bone tired, from the noise, the mess, the constant — know this: you're living in the blink." 

Living. In. The blink.

I know I just wrote about this but it bears repeating, especially since it's a constant refrain in my head, and I cannot be the only one: time is a thief. It takes things we can never get back, before we even realize they're gone. 

I used to be so exhausted when my kids' bedtime rolled around. I would go through the nightly routine — bathing and PJs, brushing teeth, reading bedtime stories, singing songs — and by the time it was done, I'd be as drained as the bathtub. The whole time, I'd be rushing it along in my head, my brain ticking through a laundry list of things I needed to get done as soon as they were put to bed (which usually included literal laundry). Hurry up and go to sleep, I'd mentally plead. Please, just don't fight it tonight. I only saw the chores before me, and the precious window of time I'd have to get them done without interference (er, "assistance"). 

I didn't see that the truly precious window of time was closing right in front of my eyes.

One day I picked my children up and held them in my arms for the very last time. One day I gave them their last bath and read them their last bedtime story. These are facts, but ones I cannot wrap my head around. It seems so surreal to think of myself performing these mundane tasks day in and day out and then just ... never doing them again. 

How did I not realize? That's got to be some sort of protective mechanism, right? Because to recognize the lasts would be to feel the full impact of the grief, of the loss, all at once — over and over, with each last. And that's the kind of grief that can shatter a heart irreversibly. So the grief I feel now is just being doled out over a period of time, rolling in and hitting me in waves rather than crashing in all at once and threatening to destroy me. That has to be by design. It's astonishing how the brain works.     

I constantly try to forgive myself for not enjoying every moment of my kids' childhood. It isn't easy — nay, practically impossible — when you're in survival mode, barely keeping your own head above water while keeping tiny humans sustained. And when you've never been on the other side of it, you simply can't realize how much you're going to miss it when it's gone.

I built this very blog — which, in turn, built my entire career — on those moments of exhaustion and overwhelm: the blink. (See here and here and here for some prime examples.) I literally wrote about them just so I could cope. But I wish it had been easier to see past all that and realize that there was a unique beauty in the chaos. That while I was wishing those moments away, time was silently absconding with my babies. 

And that some day, in the not-too-distant future, I'd be sitting here in an empty house with all the stillness I ever wanted ... and that the silence would be too loud.