This time next week, I’ll have an 8-year-old and a 9-year-old. Certain ages have more significance than others. Five is a full hand. Ten is double digits. Golden birthdays. Traditionally, eight and nine probably don’t have as much intrinsic cultural meaning, but somehow I feel like I’m losing my little girls with this birthday. Seven rounds down to five. Eight rounds up to ten. After ten, we’ll blink and start doing college tours, which I’m definitely not ready for. It’s like that scene in When Harry Met Sally when Sally realizes she’s going to be 40. “In eight years,” Harry says. Sally sniffles and blows her nose. “But it’s there.”
And it is. It’s there. Eight rounds up to ten, and ten rounds up to that semester abroad and that summer internship across the country when they come back with their first tattoo and a boyfriend who will break their heart. So… okay, I may be projecting there. But the point stands. Even as I consider going out into the cold and snow to top-off my half-full gas tank, just to have ten minutes alone in my car, I understand that the constant cacophony of these early years is already waning. As two children fight through dinner to tell first and most about their days, I realize that in a few years, I likely won’t be their first confidant. Already my older daughter’s bedroom door is closed as often as it’s open. But dear lord is life still loud right now. My brother, when I mentioned that I was maybe going to create a fortress of solitude in the below-freezing temps of the garage, replied that he was reading. Alone. In a quiet room. Perhaps the friendly fray of siblings never really ends; we just get better at it.
In the ten years since we discovered we were going to be parents, life has changed, clearly. We knew it would. We weren’t totally delusional. But we’ll still be us. Just with a baby. And we are. But we’re an altered us. I’m a different me. It’s been said that having a child is having your heart walking around outside your body, which is absolutely true. It’s dizzyingly terrifying and sometimes suddenly emotional, like that Folgers homecoming commercial in the middle of a string of volume-heavy Audi performance and Ford truck spots. Out of the blue, your ears are still ringing, but you’re a little teary, nostalgic and full of wonder and fearful hope. There’s nothing like that sense of momentary clarity. But parenting is also having your brain so full of chatter, playdates and Sign-up Genius requests that you wake up in the middle of the night paralyzed physically by half-sleep, but mind racing, full of things that will be just out of reach in the morning.
Beyond timely responses to Sign-up Genius requests, there are a lot of things I could do much better as a parent. I’m not big on playing. I will watch the dance, listen to the original song, clap and heap praise. We can bake together and read together. But I have no idea what to make the Shopkins do, and I don’t really want to figure it out. 
I’ll have a dance party in the kitchen, and look up facts about dinosaurs and the cosmos, but I honestly stopped listening half way through the made-up rules of the elaborate card game created with a combined Uno and Old Maid deck. I stopped supervising teeth brushing several years ago and now I only intervene when it sounds like, during the relaxing goodnight rituals, someone might be drawing blood. Also, I buy chocolate chips that I say are only for baking, but which I then finish off before a single cookie is made. I have room for improvement.
As babies, parenting about a basic Maslow’s hierarchy. You’re pretty much winning when your child is fed and clothed. More points if that food was freshly pureed vegetables, a standard I never achieved, and the clothing relatively clean. As the parent, we likely look like the picture of Dorian Gray, at least for a few years. My children are growing up – eight and nine, I think I mentioned in distress, rounding up to double digits, both – and I love that they can dress themselves and stir up some morning pancake batter and clean bathrooms, but it’s also more complicated now. Instead of despairing over a hard-to-fit puzzle piece, my daughter is upset because she isn’t mastering a complicated series of steps in her dance class. Tears of basic frustration and anger we had a grasp on. I could fix the farmyard animal puzzle, rezip the jacket or find the missing shoe. But these new tears of doubt and apprehension and the mental battle between the emotional and the rational? Well, crap. Deep breath. I told the story about how I’d had a difficult time sometimes in my own childhood dance classes. Scissor step, kick, ball change. I said that the semester was just starting. I said we’d take a video of the offending step combination for full reference. Then I made an ice cream sundae, which was accepted with a monotone, “Thanks.” So, I not only didn’t help, but I taught my daughter to use food as a remedy. The dessert panacea. Stand up job. And this is just a segue before teenage relationships and pre-calculus.
Our children are a mix of the good and the bad traits they inherit from us. Our genes, our habits, nurture, nature. And they’re completely their own. They talk back and refuse on principle, and they love and they trust. They’re amazing really. They’re incredibly brave. Changing schools, stitches, friendships and long division. Childhood is not for the faint of heart. Nor is parenting. Except we don’t realize the full impact of that right away. Much like we realize that having children will be like lighting our disposable income on fire, and yet aren’t completely prepared for the bonfire, we aren’t completely prepared for our own vulnerability. Things we can’t fix, shouldn’t fix, and desperately want to fix. The older my children get, the more failures fill my list.
So, we ante up and throw into the pot sleepless nights, freezing soccer games and $12 squares of fundraiser wrapping paper, dance lessons and family vacations, and we hope we get it more right than wrong. If faith is taking the first step even when you can’t see the whole staircase, sometimes parenting feels like the staircase of, say, a Chichen Itza. Tiny steps, straight up to a top you can’t quite see, but with a lot of other people on the same climb, even more who have reached the top.
And then there’s the view. 