If there’s one thing moms are good at, it’s marking time. We take pictures on the first day of school; we keep those lost baby teeth in tiny bags, hidden behind socks and under bras in dresser drawers; we make mini birthday cupcakes in the shape of crabby pattiesfor our SpongeBob loving children. (Just me?)
We’re prepared for every milestone. Except when we’re not. Sure, the expected milestones are easy. We’ve planned the day that the training wheels come off. We can buy last-day-of-school ice-cream with the best of them. We know the advice we’ll give when they head off to their first school dance. We can almost picture how they’ll look in a cap and gown and, if we could, we would have already made reservations at their favorite restaurant many years ahead. We know who’ll need tissues or a power bar or just the wink or sideways smile to get them through.
You’ve planned well. And then, one day—out of the blue—they ask you to take the glow-in-the-dark stars that it took you hours to position off the ceiling. Or maybe they’ll decide that they’re finished with princesses and firetrucks. And they would rather wear plain underwear instead of the prints with Barbie or Batman. That says you’ve hit an important milestone, maybe even more important than riding a two-wheeler or reaching a double-digit birthday, and you’re unprepared.
And then there are the lasts. The last time they crawl into your bed seeking comfort in the middle of the night. The last time they hold your hand as they cross the street. The last time they ask you to comb or brush their hair so that it looks just right. And you couldn’t possibly mark them because you likely didn’t notice until six weeks later when you thought to yourself, “They haven’t done that for a while.” These moments seem so far in the past when you remember them that marking it feels almost foolish, and even if you wanted to mark it, your child would probably balk, scampering away as if brushing their own hair is no big deal, perhaps even rolling their eyes.
Really, just what is there to do? The former owner of my home, in her nineties, still talks about the circus mural they painted over more than 50 years ago, in what is now my son’s room, marking time through wistful musings. A friend of mine has a piece of wallpaper from her child’s room in a frame on her dresser. I keep a few stars pressed between the pages of a book.
Motherhood can be bittersweet. Try as we might, we can’t catch or catalog all of the milestone moments. And even if we could—the baby teeth that were precious when my son was six— seem a little gross wrapped in plastic in and among my scarves (though I am far from ready to give them up).
I wonder if we do ourselves a disservice with all of the planning and choreographing and preserving. There is a scar on my son’s head to remind us both of the time he fell dancing around the house wearing my high heels.. There are very faint slime stains on both of our couches. Every day when they pour their own cereal, tie their own shoes, and read themselves to sleep, they serve as living reminders of what once was and what one day might be. There were no first day of school pictures in my house this year. Sitting at his desk in his bedroom— that he picked himself, and we built together— didn’t seem portrait worthy. And yet, I know we’ll talk about that day and these weeks and months of remote learning for years to come.
After I took down the stars, we painted and primed the walls together. It took us a whole weekend. We laughed, we grumbled, we handed each other paint brushes and rollers, we took in the product of our labor. The next weekend, when we built furniture for hours, I taught him the difference between a Philips head and a flat head screwdriver and how to balance a board on your knee while tightening screws. We worked shoulder to shoulder and ate a lot of potato chips and sno-caps. I don’t need a photo or a ceremony to know that he’s growing up; his work ethic, combined with the black paint and black furniture he chose, are reminder enough. Had I stopped to think about how to memorialize this tremendous change, I might have received an equally epic eye-roll. More importantly, I might have missed the exact moments I now have preserved in my memory.