Seven Years a Mother

It was on the feast of the Epiphany that I felt the first kicks. We were outside with our three children, and they were beside themselves with joy, for each of them had received a bicycle just ten minutes before. The younger two had pink balance bikes with matching helmets, but our son, who had spent the last couple of years racing through the neighborhood on a balance bike of his own, had received his first bike with pedals.

He was nervous about riding it, and I’ll admit that I was nervous, too. I didn’t know how he would take to the bike, or if he would fall and struggle to get up and try again, or if he would want to give up if riding a bicycle was harder than he was expecting it to be. But while my husband tended to our girls, I stood by our six-year-old as he perched atop his blue bike, and I placed my hand on his shoulder.

“All you have to do,” I said, “is put one foot on the ground, then the other, and keep going until you get enough speed that you can lift both feet up like you used to do on your balance bike. Except this time, you’ll put them on the pedals and you will go, go, go.”

He looked unsure, and he asked me what would happen if he fell.

“You’ll get up and try again,” I responded as tenderly as I could.

He hesitated, but then I saw a look of resolve on his little face, and he nodded. I told him I would be right beside him all the while. And so he started, a little awkwardly at first, fumbling with the pedals once or twice. But then, all of a sudden, not five minutes after he had gotten onto the bike, it clicked. His feet were on the pedals and he was laughing and yelling at the top of his lungs to his dad and his two little sisters, so that they could see that he had done it—he was riding his bike.

I was jogging along beside him, laughing too, but I could feel a few tears rolling down my cheeks. They were bittersweet: tears of joy because our eldest child had learned to ride a bike—a milestone of childhood!—but there was some sadness there, too. I blinked a second too long, I think, and there he was, zooming along on his bike. Just the other day, I was helping him take his first steps.

As he started to ride his bicycle in wide circles around me, I stopped jogging, though I was still laughing; and then I gasped, because in the midst of that delightful, bittersweet moment, I felt my fourth baby kick for the very first time.

Our fourth child, a beautiful little girl, was born in June, just a few weeks ago and just three days after her brother’s seventh birthday. Months before, my doctor had set her due date on our son’s birthday, and for months thereafter, our son asked me to make sure the baby wouldn’t be born on that day, since he was hoping not to have to share his birthday. I told him that I would do my best, of course, but that in the end, it wasn’t really up to me. May came and went, and still, the baby had not come. My son become more and more concerned about the state of affairs, and on the night before his birthday, he asked me, as politely as he could, if I would do my best not to have the baby on his birthday. I told him once more, as politely as I could (since at this point I was more than ready for that baby to be born), that I would do my best.

And I kept my word. Although my contractions started around ten in the evening after my son had gone to bed, happy as can be after spending the day celebrating his birthday, I did not give birth until three days later.

Discovering that we were expecting our fourth baby when our eldest was six years old felt like a new experience for us. No longer were we in the midst of toddlers and diapers and nap times alone. Now, we had a child who was learning how to read, who was preparing to make his First Holy Communion, who was performing in piano recitals, who wanted to learn as much as he could about Ancient Egypt, and who loved playing soccer with his dad in the backyard. We now had a child who could ride a bike.

When you are in the season of baby after baby and you can count the years of your eldest child’s life on one hand and all you know is life with babies, it’s hard to believe that at some point, perhaps sooner than you’ll allow yourself to hope, there might be a seven-year-old who can buckle his little sisters’ shoes, fill up everyone’s water bottles, read a story to the two-year-old, fetch a diaper, and get himself a second serving of dinner.

When I was newly postpartum after the birth of my first baby, I could not imagine that life would ever look different than it did in that newborn season; to me, it felt like I would always be physically exhausted, sleep-deprived, and trapped under a napping baby, and I think that feeling took away from my ability to enjoy what, in the grand scheme of things, is a very short season. But I didn’t know what I didn’t know, and since that first postpartum, I have grown to love the newborn days more and more, particularly because I’ve seen that they won’t last. I won’t always have a newborn in my arms.

Marriage and family life come with lots of different kinds of days. Many of those days bleed into each other, and it can be easy to forget that time is passing—that it’s slipping away. I’m grateful for the days that remind me that motherhood is made up of seasons, and that those will pass me by, too: there will be days I forget because they are so familiar, but there will also be days like that sunny and brisk January afternoon when my oldest child learned to ride a bike and I felt my baby kick for the very first time.

If you are still in the earliest years of motherhood and all you see before you is diapers and sleepless nights, I’m just a few years ahead of you, but I’m here to tell you that perhaps sooner than you think, those days will be behind you. Perhaps you will be relieved, and even glad; or perhaps, you will be sad that they have gone. But soon and very soon, you may look on as your seven-year-old son holds his tiny newborn sister, and you won’t want to blink.

To all my wonderful readers: thank you for being here. My writing has been more sporadic than I’ve wished over the last ten months because I had a rather difficult pregnancy, and now I’m holding a small baby 98% of the time. But I do have plans for many posts that will be coming soon, so please stick around!

Until next time!