I remember, when our son was just a few months old and we were right in the thick of the never-have-a-second-to-sit-down/take-our-eyes-off-of-our-child/sleep part of parenting, thinking how much I was looking forward to the day when we’d be able to all sit quietly in the living room with some music on, reading. Some of my favorite memories of growing up are doing just that – sitting with my parents on a porch in Maine, or on a beach somewhere, or just in our living room, all with our books. Each doing our own thing, but together.
I talk a lot about this sort of desperation I (and most mothers, I think) have to hold on to every second of these early days, these days when we’re still our children’s best friends, when they don’t just tolerate us but actually want to cuddle up next to us, when it takes nothing more than a really cool-looking worm to make them more excited than you thought a person could possibly be…but there are definitely things on the way that I’m excited about, too.
The other night, the quiet-reading-in-the-presence-of-my-child thing happened for what I think was the very first time. I was sitting on the couch, Kendrick was playing music on his computer, and suddenly I realized: oh my god. Total peace. Indy was sitting on the other side of the couch, paging through a picture book, calm and happy and in his own world. The dogs were not being lunatics for the first time in their lives. And so I picked up my iPad, and sat down to finish The Goldfinch (which I know I announced I was finishing two weeks ago, but I keep stalling – it’s just such a weirdly hard book to read more than a few pages of at a time; oof, all that anxiety), and it was amazing: the coziest, most content feeling ever.
And then, about three seconds after I picked up my book, my son turned into a lion. And that was the end of the reading and the peace and quiet.
And it was more fun, anyway.
That’s actually a pretty good summary of parenthood: no more peace and quiet, but more fun anyway.
