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"Enjoy every moment. They grow up so fast." Encouragement or guilt-inducing?


Lisa R.
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I always found it slightly patronizing. And I don't think that it really explains well how time moves as you get older. I feel that I did treasure my little kids even though, many, many days I wished for early bedtimes. And I do treasure my days with my older kids, even as I lay awake worrying about all the troubles the world can bring.

 

Time moves quickly as you get older. I find I have to work harder to be present in the moment and be more aware of how my kids need me.

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  I guess I say this from the perspective of being still very much involved with my own parents even though they are 3000 miles away.

 

So how does being very involved look like for you, with such a long distance?

I am really struggling with this; having my family 5,000 miles away just sucks.

Weekly Skype calls nice, but not "being involved". And don't get me started on Christmas .. that's when it feels really lonely. We have a good relationship with my parents, but I feel that neither is involved in the other's daily life.

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I find it encouraging. My oldest joined the army when he was 19. He left to Oklahoma, then Alaska and then Iraq. I had him when I was 16 and had spent more than half of my life raising him. Then he was on his own and I was left here. Thankfully, I had other kids at home. I remember thinking how dare he do exactly what I wanted him to do... Grow up! How dare he just leave when my life had been taking care of him! It was tough and I realized it all went by so very fast. And well... Then as most of you know... He was killed in a car accident 2.5 years later. But even before that... I realized that this time as mundane, tedious, icky and yucky as it can sometimes be is INDEED a gift and only a season. Try to enjoy as much as you can of it.

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I am surprised that so many seem to take this literally - no sane mother would expect another mother to enjoy every moment. It doesn't seem particularly encouraging or guilt-inducing to me. I assumed it was said by people who are nostalgic for the "good old days" with their kids. I see this as being more about them than me.

 

Having said that, I do try to enjoy every moment. Why not? I only get one shot at this life. I want to enjoy as much of it as possible. The fact that I do not always succeed doesn't make me feel guilty.

 

 

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Neither. Honestly, when someone says this, I don't think they're talking for my benefit at all... they're saying it for themselves, reminiscing about the old days. Smile and carry on.

 

For myself, I appreciate the sentiment... but it IS, well, sentimental. I'm not going to enjoy the moments where my kid has a screaming temper tantrum in the middle of the store or when the baby poops all of themselves (and me. And the couch. and the floor). I prefer more of a "cherish this age while it lasts" kind of attitude. When my kids are grown up and are leading their own lives, I'm sure I'll magically develop the ability to view the past with rose-coloured glasses as well. ;)

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So how does being very involved look like for you, with such a long distance?

I am really struggling with this; having my family 5,000 miles away just sucks.

Weekly Skype calls nice, but not "being involved". And don't get me started on Christmas .. that's when it feels really lonely. We have a good relationship with my parents, but I feel that neither is involved in the other's daily life.

I'm thinking more of emotional involvement.  I do the weekly calls - phone, not Skype because my parents are late 80's, early 90's and couldn't handle such "new fangled stuff"!  But I also did daily calls during my dad's cancer treatment.  And I talked to the doctor because they aren't good at that and I am.  And I contribute to them having monthly housecleaning help.  (My other siblings do the same to varying degrees.)  And when there are big decisions in my own family we discuss it with both my parents and my ILs and ask for their advice and vice versa.  We don't always take the advice and neither do they, but we value their wisdom and consideration and that is what is important, I think.  With my ILs who live much closer, it is the fact that we all pitch in to help move or clean or cook together for holidays.  Those things provide for a sense of "family" even though we go home to sleep in different houses.  

 

It isn't the daily minutia that is important to me in my kid's teen years.  It's the emotional connection we have when we talk and play and work together.  And the fact that they ask for my advice even though they don't always take it. . . 

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I find it annoying.

 

Once when dd was a baby I was shopping with her and she was tired and fretful. The proverbial 'little old lady' stopped me and said sweetly, "You should rock her". I bristled at the unwanted advice as I was struggling to get things done with a baby that got so much of my attention so much of the time. Then she added, spreading her hands a foot apart, "With a rock this big".

 

The politically correct might say that it's not funny to joke about knocking babies out with rocks, but I think of that unknown lady often, and wish she could know how much I valued that interaction. With one silly comment she reminded me that my horrible shopping trip was just one moment in my day, that I'd laugh about it all one day, and might as well laugh now, that I wasn't terrible for sometimes feeling overwhelmed, and that I wasn't alone in feeling like that.

 

Once I laughed and relaxed a little, the lady told me she'd parented a big family of children and foster children. She must have been a wonderful mother to them all.

I love this! Thanks for sharing. I don't typically get approached anymore but when I was a young mom with a baby I got all sorts of unsolicited advice from people assuming baby was fussy because I had to be dumb and inexperienced. The truth was my first baby was strong willed or spirited (whatever philosophy you prefer) and yes, she napped, ate and had been changed and no I was not throwing her off her schedule. Wish I would have had this wise old lady instead! Now at almost 30 with 3 kids 9 and under and visibly another on the way I must have acquired the look of someone not to mess with ;)

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I plan on having 30 or 40 years with my kids - depending on how long we all live.  I don't expect them to live at home.  And I don't expect them to include me in every aspect of their life.  But even at the ages my kids are now, they are their own people with their own hopes, dreams, personalities, schedules etc.  I guess I say this from the perspective of being still very much involved with my own parents even though they are 3000 miles away.  And dh (and I) are still very much involved with his.  Not inappropriately involved - there are boundaries (which had to be enforced with the in-laws) but the relationship is still there.  

 

I do look back with fondness on the preschool years especially.  I loved teaching those little sponges at those ages!  But I don't really want to go back to that. I look at my son who only has one more year of high school and I don't feel any panic about him being gone in a year (or two depending on finances).  I know that he will still be my son and will still love me even as his horizons expand more and more.  

 

I am so glad you feel this way.

 

I guess it's the daily intimacy that I'm thinking of.  Things like- getting up and spending breakfast together, reading together, driving a hour through a blizzard white knuckled together :glare: , and being so much in each other space that we are irking each other.  That's what I'm going to miss I think.  My nieces were "gone" by the time they were in high school.  They were just busy and that linger time with mom and dad didn't happen anymore.

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If I had a dollar for every time someone said that to me I could pay a babysitter to give me a break once in awhile, :-). I agree with you it's an obnoxious thing to say. People who say that only remember the good which is great. My mom is the worst. "You never did that, you slept great, you didn't yell in restaurants or scream in the car, etc." I'm glad people can look back so fondly on what has been for me a very difficult time in life. I'm looking forward to that selective amnesia. :-) What I will tell people and what I have noticed is that it gets easier. I'm not a baby person though.

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People don't mean to be obnoxious when they say that. They are wistfully remembering those days now that they are over. I had at least one child in diapers for 12 solid years, and the entire decade of the 1990's doesn't exist in my memory. When I was in the midst of raising little ones, people would admonish me to enjoy my children now because when they grew to be teenagers it would be so much more difficult. That irritated me, because I had no intention of having difficult teenagers. Actually, the teen years were enjoyable, and it was a blessing seeing my kids grow up. But now that they are leaving home, I'm beginning to look wistfully at mothers with young children and think, "I hope she enjoys them now, because they grow up so fast!" 

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I got over it after high school, when I got out into the real world and realized that the people who said "Enjoy it, these are the best years of your life!" when it felt like a neverending hellhole were full of BS. So I figured it was a similar situation and ignored it.

 

Now that my oldest has reached the ripe old age of 10 and my probably-last pregnancy is almost half over when it feels like it barely started, I'm a little more inclined to agree with them. But I'd never say it to someone in the trenches - it isn't considerate of where they are.

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A little old lady, a stranger in a store when ds was an infant, told me once.....enjoy him now while you know whose arms he is in. I think of that comment often.

 

I had ds13, my only child when I was 34, almost 35. Every day has been like watching the sand run through the hour glass. I am seeing signs in myself of being able to let him go eventually....but it is hard. He has been the greatest joy of my life.

 

I do like the saying, the days are long but the years are short.

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I get that said to me all the time, I always take it to mean they are wishing they had enjoyed that time more themselves.

 

I actually hear, "Boy you have your hands full" more often.  Sometimes it bothers me, I always wonder if they think my kids are wild or something.  Then I snap out of it and realize that I have good kids and I shouldn't put much stock into what a random person thinks after a 30 second encounter.

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I get that said to me all the time, I always take it to mean they are wishing they had enjoyed that time more themselves.

 

 

Bingo.

 

I remember hating it when people said that to me back in the days the dinosaurs roamed the earth and dd1 was a baby so I try really hard not to say it to anyone but myself, but I started finding that very difficult when I had teens and not enough courage yet to know that ds2 was in my future.

 

I wish I could follow my own advice. The older he gets, the closer I get to reverting back into that creepy old lady at the grocery store who stares your newborn a little bit too long and bites her tongue because you aren't any older than her ex-baby and she knows you'll grow up soon enough and figure it out yourself.

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So tonight I was trying to enjoy the moment.  I was reading a lovely Christmas story to my kids before bed.  They decided to be obnoxious to each other and it ended in tears.  Which is what often happens when I make an effort to do something "nice" (as opposed to being my usual drill sergeant self on school nights).  No wonder I don't have a brain full of lovely special memories of motherhood....

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So tonight I was trying to enjoy the moment.  I was reading a lovely Christmas story to my kids before bed.  They decided to be obnoxious to each other and it ended in tears.  Which is what often happens when I make an effort to do something "nice" (as opposed to being my usual drill sergeant self on school nights).  No wonder I don't have a brain full of lovely special memories of motherhood....

 

yeah, this happens all the time here.

 

Putting up the Christmas tree is AWFUL!

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After my second was born and right in the sleepless nights newborn stage, my neighbor with teenagers told me that she misses getting up with babies in the middle of the night. I just rolled my eyes and laughed. Sure you miss it. You don't have to do it any more.

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After my second was born and right in the sleepless nights newborn stage, my neighbor with teenagers told me that she misses getting up with babies in the middle of the night. I just rolled my eyes and laughed. Sure you miss it. You don't have to do it any more.

I think I was miserably pregnant with my third (and could barely walk and every step I was in pain. My husband worked 12 hour days.) and an old man at the grocery store said "I wish we could have had 20 of them [children]."

 

Now, I love cute old men. But I wanted to say "well there is probably a reason you didn't." It took us almost two years to pay off our medical bills from our third- and that's only because we sold our car. Otherwise it would have taken another year. And if we were having more we couldn't have sold our car because our only other car is a tiny 5 seater.

 

I think I am just ultra-sensitive about this stuff. I love my kids and I want to enjoy every moment. There I already so much I don't remember (my poor second child. Cannot remember anything from his first three years). And most days are passed with lots of whining, crying, fighting, poop everywhere.

 

And I have always wanted a huge family. So unrealized dreams. Plus we have a lot of friends who have a more quiverful mindset and whether its on purpose or not, they make it out like you are not faithful unless you have a large family etc.

 

Sorry for the vent. :)

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"Don't wish there childhood away" was the best advice I ever received.  My aunt told me that when I was wishing my oldest would sleep through the night.  She told me that every stage of childhood is a gift and will be gone before you know it and to try to relax and enjoy it.  I really tried to take it to heart and live by it.  I certainly failed on many occasions but I tried (and I still try but teenagers can be challenging).

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Even the "long days/short years" induces guilt in me. Definitely the "enjoy every moment" thing.

 

I'll be honest. . . I loved my grandmother completely and totally, but she could be extremely difficult. She once stayed w/ me for two weeks -- I was so happy -- and it was a long two weeks. She was known for being bossy and picky and wanting her way.

 

But I adored her. She's gone now and I miss her daily but I don't think "why didn't I enjoy every moment with her??" I can see with my Gram that that would have been impossible. "Every moment" was not always very fun.

 

Same with kids.

 

Alley

 

 

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It does make me bristle but I think it's well-meaning.

 

I do try to enjoy every moment but SKL's example happens here all too often.  Not every moment is enjoyable.  2 days ago they got a note in the Advent calendar that said something about doing something nice for a family member in secret.  Don't ask what happened that day.  Really, don't.

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