We Will Be Sorry

Someday we are going to be sorry.

Not one fiber of my being is being judgmental. Trust me. I am on the exact same ship as everyone else. But it's a ship that all of us parents are on, and for the life of me, I don't know who is steering the boat.

But as sure as I sit here, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt, that we are all going to be sorry.

We are going to be sorry that we didn't take more family walks. We are going to be sorry that most of our springs and falls were spent running from one sport to the next. And please don't get me wrong, I am a HUGE fan of sports. (If you need proof of this, my ring tone on my phone is Centerfield by John Fogerty because I am so pumped about upcoming baseball season.) I think sports are great for kids. I think they teach life skills, are great exercise, and they keep kids out of trouble. But I do think we will be sorry we did SO MANY sports, and that we did them so many nights a week, and that we will be sorry we didn't take more breaks.

We will be sorry that our children can beat the neighbor's high score on Mario Kart, but doesn't know how to skip a rock across the water. I'm ashamed to admit that my children have never even played charades.

We will be sorry we didn't throw the DSi's off the balcony, and put on our rubber boots and jump in every rain puddle we could find.
We will long for days laying in the grass looking at the clouds. We will wish we had read more, rushed less, and been more laid back.
Someday the laughter we hear outside will not be our children's, but the laughter of the children of our new, younger neighbors.
We will think back, and I don't know about you, but my heart and hugging arms will ache.

What if some of the money spent on traveling teams and hotel costs, Under Armour, and over the moon birthday parties was spent on family trips to interesting places like Nantucket or Washington D.C. There is a place-- in Oregon of all places-- where you sit around a campfire and tell stories at night, ride horses, and sleep in beautifully lit and incredibly high tree houses at night. I want to go there so bad it almost makes my stomach ache. And why don't I? What is keeping me from doing something so beautifully crazy? I could just go to Oregon, with the family, for no reason other than the knowledge that you only live once.

Why not? Why the heck not?

I can honestly say that there is not one minute during the day that I am with my children that I don't feel rushed. Even if we are reading together, I am still thinking about how I need to be starting supper, and the fact that we need to hurry because they need baths or showers, etc., or they won't get into bed on time and then they will be tired and won't do as well in school. In the morning I am a Marine sergeant with bad hair, sheet marks on my face, and an attitude. Our day is never started on a calm note. My oldest might as well be catapulted through the bus window with his jacket half on.

Recently, I have heard a clock ticking. A BIG clock. And it's not a biological clock. It's that clock that when you have children, begins to tick faster and faster each year.

It begins when you realize you are not their whole world anymore, when you realize that they would rather hang with the kid down the street for the umpteenth time than go with you to the movies and eat loads of popcorn and M&M's. It begins when they tell you something crazy great that happened at school, but it's news from a week and a half ago because they forgot to tell you. And it reminds you of those times when they were smaller and jumped into your car from preschool instantly and insanely ecstatic over a piece of paper with one purple line on it that they made for you.

And for those of us with sons, you lay there at night realizing that more than likely your son is going to follow the girl he falls in love with wherever she may go, and it's probably going to be somewhere like Nebraska. And if she wants to spend Christmas with her family almost every year, they probably will. Because she is the girl, and he is the boy whose job is to make her happy.

It's going to hit me one day. Did I really not play Scrabble so I could just finish that last load of laundry? Isn't striving for an uncluttered living area important? Won't that make us an even happer more efficient family?? Won't it??

But the truth of the matter is that one day they will be gone, and there won't be anything much to do except laundry.

That's when it will hit us. That's when we will be sorry.

Because once they have waved to us from that graduation line and gone on to Harvard, or Auburn, or the local commumity college, they are not going to want to learn how to skip rocks anymore.

The time will have passed.