There is an Onion Under my Counter

I am beginning to wonder if the key to enjoying parenthood is just being a blubbering sentimental fool. I have and do enjoy my daughters SO MUCH, but it’s always with this bittersweet grasping at the “now” and a hesitancy of stepping into the future. This is my own issue, and something I’m working to remedy, especially as my littles are becoming not quite so little anymore. I long to enjoy without the fear, just as I long to not take for granted. In my younger years, when I was “in the trenches” of parenting, there was a lot about this mothering role that I found very difficult. Generally speaking, it was the constant attachment and feeling of the loss of self. It was so hard for me to ENJOY the tediousness of the long days at the beginning. It was so different from the life I’d been used to living! I left a lot on the doorstep when I stepped over the threshold of Motherhood. Some of those things will still be waiting for me whenever I return to them. Some have deteriorated in time. I can acknowledge the lost things without a speck of regret—but I do admit there were difficulties in finding my place of comfort as a mom. That has changed over the years… not only am I in my place of comfort now, but it is better than any other place I could ever be.

This morning I was vacuuming the kitchen floor and I saw that there is an onion on the floor in the corner where the counter bends. I say “is” because I left the onion there. It is not the first onion that has had a little chill time in that corner. The floors in our elderly house are terrible and there is a dip at that spot… everything that rolls or scoots will make its way into that filthy little corner. I have five daughters and every single one of them enjoyed removing the papery skins from onions as toddlers, and they would scatter onions around the kitchen in their play while I cooked. This was an ordinary occurrence that frustrated me a little bit at times because it felt like there was some damaging of good food going on. (Looking back, I see that the onions didn’t mind, and I shouldn’t have either.) In any case, my girls have long since given up the onion skinning habit and it’s rare for me to find one in the dark recesses of the kitchen anymore. This particular vegetable, intended for a summer salad, wasn’t put there by my children, but by my visiting nephew who is a very busy 21 month old. He, of course, didn’t realize when he put the onion there that he was giving me a reminder of earlier days, or making me smile with happy memories of my own toddlers, but gosh, that onion really meant something big to me.

These days we are waiting on Anja’s college dorm assignment. It is late, and we are all anxious to hear where she will be living and with whom. In the margins of summer fun the three middle girls are working on math, while I’m listing out books we’ll need to order for our fall homeschool semester, which will be for two high school, one junior high, and one elementary student. Four students instead of five, even the baby solidly in school. The baby, who is AT LAST beginning to read and write. She is by far my latest at reading and writing, and is only just now (like, just TODAY) writing out phonetic words in her pictures and comics. I know it’s devilish to compare children, but my others hit this milestone at age 4, maybe 5, so this feels very late to me. But, OF COURSE, when her own time was right, she just started doing it, and doing it just fine. Picking out words she recognizes, sounding out words to herself, she read half of “Go Dog Go” then got tired and had me finish it for her. This morning she drew a picture of her octopus with a word bubble saying “I wish for a new place to live” (not spelled entirely correctly, but understandable anyway!) (“for” was spelled “fowr” which I thought was so cute. It’s interesting to me how little kids hear and interpret words that we overlook as commonplace.)

Look at me, 18 years into parenthood, still fretting over milestones like a silly-nilly.

My middle child turned 14 yesterday. She still carries a stuffed animal under her arm everywhere she goes. I know that eventually that scruffy little stuffed mouse will be tucked away someplace for safekeeping, but I don’t know when that will happen. My 17 year old fusses over her hair and clothes more than anyone else I know, but spends most of her time writing stories and playing music. I imagine she’ll always do all of those things—style, fuss, write, draw, and make music—these are things she has always done!—but I won’t always be a daily firsthand observer. My 12 year old is very much a 12 year old who entertains herself and others with things like this:

and I can’t begin to guess her future path. She cries, she slams doors, and she makes us laugh so hard. She is the one who centers my current parenting state, the bridge between the little world and the teen world. Still interested in all things childhood, while simultaneously annoyed that she has leg hair, she connects Sylvi to the rest of the older sisters.

And there you have it. No more onions in the corner, but all these other “onions in the corners” that will also be gone eventually. As I write this, there is an electric guitar blaring out from the room next to mine, and a pile of graduation party thank-you notes sit near to me alongside Anja’s address book. A home for a stuffed dog is being made out of a cereal box. Sylvi just showed me that she added “real windows” made of packing taple All of these things are existing together, right now, and I’m savoring it all.

Thanks, little nephew, for leaving that onion present as a reminder that no phase lasts forever.