Am I Missing It?

How could I possibly be missing it? I'm here all the time.

I'm changing wet beds and making snacks and having my ear chattered off at the grocery store. I'm playing Mouse Trap and washing mud pies off their bellies. I'm helping with spelling lists for hours per week and listening to the "at-home reading" every day. I'm reading those really long Magic School Bus books, with all the extra stuff on the page, that they love and I hate. I'm curling hair and singing the "Speckled Frog Math Song" as I brush their teeth.

How could I possibly be missing it? But, somehow I don't remember that little boy at all. I must have missed it.

“The biggest mistake I made [as a parent] is the one that most of us make. … I did not live in the moment enough. This is particularly clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs. There is one picture of [my three children] sitting in the grass on a quilt in the shadow of the swing set on a summer day, ages six, four, and one. And I wish I could remember what we ate, and what we talked about, and how they sounded, and how they looked when they slept that night. I wish I had not been in such a hurry to get on to the next thing: dinner, bath, book, bed. I wish I had treasured the doing a little more and the getting it done a little less” (Anna Quindlen, Loud and Clear [2004], 10–11).