A Matter of Time

There is a lot of everything this summer. I am staying home with my three young children, although the two older girls will have some summer morning activities to free up some of my time. I have slowed down on my current writing project because I just won't have the time or energy to dedicate to it. Most of the days seem very similar, but they are not. Things shift and move, including how I feel from day-to-day.

Yesterday I woke up and the first thing I learned about was what had happened in Orlando. My husband had let me sleep in and was watching the kids. Because our kids are so young, (all under 7) its not something we would talk about in front of them. I held onto this feeling of danger, of something that I needed to bury, to hold out and look at later.

I was reminded why I shield my children from these things later. If I told my daughters, it would seem inconceivable to them. It would scare them so much that they would think that the world is too scary for them to navigate before they have even begun to learn the tools they need to navigate it. And it is a scary world, and most adults still don't have the tools they need. I'm not sure I can give them what they need to go out into the world. I think most of what they need they will learn on their own. But it has to be on their own timeline. If the world allows it.

As I was putting my youngest daughter to sleep, she told me that when she grows up, she wants to take care of her older sister and her baby brother, to help me. I realized she thought that she will age but not her older sister and baby brother. She wants to keep them exactly as they are, inside her, forever. I will feed him (her baby brother), she said, I will change his diaper and play with him. In many ways, when I look at my own siblings, my brothers and sister, I see them through the lens of my memories of them: my sister bathing her baby doll in the sink, my brother pretending to hit a home run, my baby brother letting me hide him in a cardboard box from my parents. I hope my daughter keeps this of herself too, this precious four-year-old, wildly imaginative, stubborn, sensitive, caring and affectionate. I hope she sees this little girl in her when the world looms large and scary, remembers her later when I can no longer protect her. Her essential nature, that core of her made of a prickly temper and a fierce love of her family and friends, a trust in her own ability to do things the way she wants. I believe that will carry her. I hope it will.