One thing no one prepares you for as you enter parenthood is how differently you’ll learn to view time.

One day it feels like you’ve been pregnant for 87 months years, and the next, you’re wondering how it’s possible that you’re due this month (and also thinking you should probably pack that hospital bag at some point.) 

Time. 

During the crazy, chaotic days of raising kids, there never seems to be enough of it. There are simply more things to be done than there is time in a day.

When your baby wakes up one, two, eight times a night, there’s not enough time to get the sleep you need before having to begin all over again. 

When the days are long and everyone is crying, you wonder how on earth you’ll make it all the way to bedtime. The minutes creep by so. slowly.

You find yourself wishing away and simultaneously longing for more time. 

You want to rush past the stage of night feedings and teething and being so needed all the time.  

You can’t fathom a time when you’ll be able to eat, sleep, pee, breathe in peace. It seems so many light years away.

But then one day you look up, and the tiny, fully-dependent-on-you, 7-pound baby you brought home from the hospital is nowhere to be found.

They’re more self-sufficient every day, needing you in different ways now – some more demanding and some less.

Before you know it, they look more like a toddler than a baby, and then, out of nowhere, they start to resemble a full-fledged kid.

They have personalities. Skills. Opinions (so many opinions). 

And it’s in those moments you realize their childhood is slipping right through your fingers. It’s then that you wish you could get back some of those days gone by.

Time is a funny thing.

How can something so (relatively) new also seem so far away? A few months, even a few years, is such a short time in the scheme of things.

And yet, life before these little humans seems unimaginable. Foreign. Completely far off. Like it existed in another lifetime altogether. 

And so, I’m reminded to be grateful for time. The long and the short. The days I wish would hurry along, and the moments I would give just about anything to get back.

Because time is never guaranteed, their childhood is fleeting, and babies surely don’t keep. 

Originally published on the author’s blog

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