I Can't Seem to Stop them Growing

Son has lost six teeth. When I tuck him in at night, he doesn't always kiss me (though at least he always tells me he "loves me too"). When I pick him up at school wearing the hat he thinks is "stupid," he looks mortified and begs me not to wear that thing in the school. Of course, since he is only just seven, he whines this request.

He still crumples into tears when he gets truly hurt. He has lately taken to turning on the whine-and-cry faucet when the injustices practiced upon him by his pest of a little sister get to be too much.

And yet, there is no denying that my children are getting bigger. It is not just that I can hardly pick up Son or that the clothes that fit both of them in the fall are now perilously short in the legs and sleeves.

It is that they are growing up.

Son, I am realizing, has long conversations with his friends. Actual conversations. Because his best friend at school knew that Son's backpack zipper had broken, and so we had ordered a new one, but it was going to take a few days to arrive, and so he was carrying his boots and folder to school in a bag until the new backpack got here (and so on, in one enormous, breathless sentence). And she knew what he wanted for his birthday. He has friends who may well know things about him that I do not. He has connections and conversations and time that he spends over which I have no control.

Sure, he went to daycare and had hours at a time over which I had no direct supervision. But when I picked him up there, I could check the little chart on the wall to see what items of his lunch he ate (or not) or how long his nap was. He would chatter in the car all the way home about who said what, and who played with the truck first on the playground, and what tricks the visiting magician had done, and who didn't eat all of his fruit at lunch, and who had three time outs, and every other item he considered noteworthy of the day.

Now, I meet him at the school bus, ask him how his day was, and he murmurs, "good." When I ask him what he did, he responds, "I don't know." It's not that he can't have a conversation. In fact, he can have good ones about food or Star Wars or snowman building. But not about school. It's as if school is private. It's not that it's not going well. I get the sense, more, that it is that he has certain things he wants to keep to himself. That he doesn't want to share absolutely everything about his life. That he has a sense of independence at school, and that he wants to preserve that independence for himself.

Daughter, in her own right, is becoming more independent. She has recently announced, "I am going to do some art," and then gotten out her art box and spent two hours on her own, cutting and gluing and beglittering and decorating. She has firm ideas about what she wants to wear every day (a dress, "a pretty one," and no, a skirt is not the same as a dress, even though it also requires tights). The two of them can keep each other giggling for half an hour.

Make no mistake, they still need me plenty. "Mama!" she shouts from the bedroom, "Can you find me a show?" and that's my cue to go wield the remote through all the menus that require reading. "Mama," he beckons as I'm cooking dinner, "can you help me with these Legos?" "Mama," she whines, "he slammed himself in my face and closed the door and won't let me in." "MAMA!" he squawks, indignant, " she won't stop touching my airplane." And so on. They need me to mediate, to soothe boo boos, to help them read the directions, to keep them on task, to make their lunches and wash their clothes, to give them their special tucks in bed every night.

But I wonder sometimes how much longer they will snuzzle me in the morning. I worry that there may soon come a day when, instead of me asking them not to hang all over me, they suddenly do not want to sit on the same chair as I am using. I hope that I am teaching them kindness and empathy and a sense of emotional connection so that even when they outgrow their Mama adoration, they will not only still love their parents but be able to expand their hearts into loving other people as well.

But, oh, even as I admire their new skills (he will read to her! for an hour! she can ice skate! without holding onto anything!), I feel a little tug at my heartstrings for the babies melting away before my eyes.