These Moments

“I want to keep having fun” she protests, but the clock indicates it’s past bedtime. We know all too well what venturing too far past bedtime entails — it isn’t worth it. How lucky that hanging out with us is her idea of fun, her choice even. For a moment, I feel guilty for sending her to bed.

There’s glimmers of this phase passing, when we are no longer our kids’ entire worlds. My three year-old playing in the bath, raises her small pruney hand and demands that I, “Get ouuuuuuuut!” My five year-old insists I return to bed, when I interrupt her and her sister’s early morning play, with my presence.

I snuggle our tiniest daughter in extra close, breathe in her sweetness as she paws my face in the very early morning. I wrap my arm around her little body as she drifts off to sleep again.

I’m so lucky our spirits found one another. I’m so lucky these beautiful existences are intertwined with my own.

These are the things I remind myself of when I find the crackers they asked for smashed into tiny crumbs under the feet of a ferocious plastic TRex. Or when one is loudly begging to leave the park and the other removes her shoes in an even louder statement of refusal to leave the sandbox. Or when two of them have escaped their beds, far after bed time, laughing hysterically while hiding behind the kitchen table hoping to prolong their inevitable recapture. When they throw down more attitude than I have had sleep. When I want to rip the hair from my head and scream, “For the love!!!” or maybe a whole string of poorly matched obscenities — don’t judge, I’m tired.

But then her fingers curl around mine and I look down at the hand holding my own. Would you even be you if you weren’t this obstinate, fiery or ridiculous? Would we even be us without these moments? And in that moment — that exact moment — I wouldn’t change any of it.