When babies are little, veteran parents feel compelled to say to the new parents “the days are long, but the years are short.” They advise you to savor every moment while your kids are little.
As a new parent, I nodded and agreed and felt like there was no truer statement than ‘the days are long.’ I wouldn’t have admitted it, but there were times I was kind of guiltily hoping for the ‘short year’ part to kick in on account of all those endless diaper filled days and sleepless nights melting into one as I wiped what I hoped was baby food out of my hair.
Much to my dismay, I’ve discovered the ‘years are short’ thing has now become painfully true. It boggles my mind to look at my newly minted 12 year old with feet as large as mine and big ideas of his own and think that he was once the snuggly little baby with soft brown eyes the size of the moon.
My brain can’t reconcile the two being the same person.
The days don’t feel as long when you’re not up to your elbows in poopy diapers and wading through pureed food with unwashed hair and mountains of laundry to sort through. In fact, the days are feeling pretty short lately.
(Although, I wouldn’t trade where we are now, we have arrived in many ways. I guess I kind of miss the little snuggly baby sometimes, but I thoroughly enjoy the young man who will still give a great bear hug even if he won’t snuggle.)
Time shrinks when you view it as punctuated by the big memories, the big celebrations. This year as Christmas comes around again, it feels the same as the previous ones. The same decorations come out; the same practice of cutting down a poor defenseless tree and hauling it into the house; hosting my family on Christmas Eve; buying, wrapping, and stashing the presents. It feels like we just did this all not too long ago.
Something I’m trying to remember is that the years don’t feel as short for the kids. When you haven’t lived more than a decade or so, everything you do is a large percentage of your life. It feels bigger and more important. Christmastime alone is a huge chunk of their lives.
I am going to keep that in mind when it feels to me like just another Christmas season.
For our kids, the years are long. The small things are big. The big things are even bigger.
Until they aren’t.
There is no time stamp that tells you when things start to feel like you’re on a carousel of the calendar and you keep seeing the ring pass by with each new year. There is no warning. And I doubt things slow down any time soon.
Hopefully your days are long, but no matter how hard you try, the years are short… So take some tired advice and savor them while you can.