Time flies. We’ve written about happy stuff in this blog. But I’d be a big liar if I said we’d received all challenges with smiles and open arms. We aren’t optimists, but we try to be. In the process of it we struggle; we leap past one hurdle and trip over another. Challenges sneak up on us, rarely in turn, often at once. So along the race we smash into roadblocks; we pick ourselves up, we move on. And there, right before us, is another.
The past 4 months have been wearing. We fell ill, undergone procedures, a day surgery, hospitalisation. There were special obligations to fulfil, big payments, decisions. I had to fill so much in every moment that I failed to realise how, in doing so, I had missed so much.
Joel had completed a lovely open-house project. His reading had progressed from books with font size 24 to size 12, but he’d forgotten his Mandarin and couldn’t tell them apart from ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. He’d started helping with household chores and worked off his baby fats. From school he picked up the art of dispensing cheeky winks and moving an eyebrow. His singing moved from a hopeless monotone to a perceptible tune. He gulped less water during swim classes and developed an almost obsessive penchant to dinosaurs and dragons and everything spiny and scaly.
And Amos? Oh, that pesky and lovely boy! who sets us off one minute and drives us to cuddle him the next. His craze-factor went up fourfold during play thanks to his brother. He discovered how to make realistic airplane sounds at the expense of a drenched bib. He started verbalising his intentions—legibly, and mastered the skill of pretending he hadn’t heard our instructions. He got a kick out of being haughty and lifting his chin and wagging a finger and saying “no” to us ten times over. He started taking on stairs by himself. He managed to eat without spilling. He drank from a cup. He grew a few centimetres. He could read ten words. He invented new dance moves. He was prescribed glasses. Round, funny, oversized glasses.
A period of quarantine never deterred the boys from their games.
In the heat of a manic rush or the pain of difficult periods it’s easy to miss the dearest moments. I’d like to remember the day Joel tied his own shoelaces but I can’t. I had put off jotting it down and now I’ve lost it forever. Thinking back, these were all that I could recollect, when I sat down to write.
And in recollecting I was reminded of how emotionally vulnerable we are, that in frustrating over the challenges and roadblocks along the way, we might let such beautiful moments slip.
Hanging on to the facets of life is harder than we thought, and perhaps this is why we think children grow up too quickly. But they haven’t. Instead, they have been taking their time; trying to show us what they’d be one moment and another. But we wouldn’t look at them because we’ve got more important stuff to look at, more woes to fret over. Most of the time we’d appear spent, exhausted, enervated.
Then they’d turn away. Life would go on. And we’d have missed most of it.
I just realised again—I haven’t been reading to Joel and Amos as much as I had, once, a time so long ago I couldn’t remember. Or perhaps the bandwidth of my mind had shortened. Perhaps it was cluttered, burdened.
Perhaps it’s time I get back to it.