Wishing my life away

As a kid, one of the sayings that often rang in my ears was the voice of someone telling me to quit wishing my life away. Maybe that’s because I was the second born, always trying to keep up with a big sister and wanting to do whatever it was she was doing at the time. I can’t count the number of times I was met by the statement, “You’ll get your turn some day when you are older. Don’t wish your life away.”

I guess things like that stay with us because now, as a parent I still find myself trying to wish myself out of a stage of life or a moment in time, hoping a better one will come to fill its place.

I remember my sister joking one time that she couldn’t wait until her two kids got old enough to read a chore list. I thought, “Ooooh, that would be a really good stage of parenthood.”

Over Christmas I had a similar conversation with my sisters-in-law. It seemed every time we tried to sit down to visit, some little person would come pulling on our shirt tails needing something that just couldn’t seem to wait one more minute.

One of the moms said, “Oh, I can’t wait until they can just get a snack for themselves. It seems all I do all day long is dole out food and drinks!” Boy, could I empathize. And I chimed in with a wish of my own. “Yeah, and what about dressing themselves? I might actually be able to go somewhere on time if we could just get to the point where they could get dressed by themselves.”

Of course that led to thoughts of miracle children who could bathe themselves, wipe their own bottoms, and put themselves to bed at night. Then I realized that if we keep wishing for all these things to pass, before we know it, they’ll be grown. Then we’ll be saying, “Where did all the time go? Where are my babies?”

Change is usually a difficult thing for folks to handle, but it has occurred to me that there is really nothing too difficult about having a change of attitude, a change of mind, or a change of heart, especially if the outcome can change your life.

So I’ve decided to make that change concerning the sometimes difficult, always interesting predicaments my children throw my way. With an ever-changing attitude and a functionally-numb mind, my heart may be the only thing that saves me on days when things get hard to handle.

But instead of wishing yet another stage of life away, I think I’ll try enduring the stage I’m in. Find ways to relish the chaos. Indulge in the delicacies of the moment, like slobbery kisses and “I love you’s” spoken with a lisp. Learn to wish my life to stay, day to day, just as it is. Interesting. Madding. Blessed.

And that’s All in a day’s work!