Keep the Bacon, Bring Home True Equality

I just read a story from The Washington Post and reprinted in The Seattle Times with the headline “Report: Wives Bringing Home More of Bacon,” about a study released today outlining an apparently encouraging new trend: American wives are earning more income than ever before.

The report, published by the Pew Research Center, shows that women have emerged as the dominant income provider in one of five marriages and are overall more educated and more present in the workforce than compared with 1970. The study stems from Census Bureau stats of married people ages 30-44, an age group that is the first in U.S. history to include more women than men with college degrees, according to the story.

Though men are still the major “contributors” of household income — with 78 percent making at least as much or more as their wives — the percentage of women whose income has outpaced their husbands shot from 4 percent in 1970 to 22 percent now. And in the recent recession, women fared better than men, losing their jobs at a lesser rate than men and shouldering the financial burdens of their families. Much of this sea-change is due to the gains of the women’s movement, experts point out.

Good news, right? Well sure, any time women begin to approach a level of equality with men, it’s positive. Because, being that we’re all human beings equally capable of achievement, it stands to reason that we should be valued equally by the society we’ve set up for ourselves.

What I take issue with is the weight we, as Americans, give financial achievement over other measures of success. Take these quotes, from the story: 

“What’s radically changed is that marriage is now a better deal for men,” said Richard Fry, co-author of the report. “Now when men marry, often their spouse works quite a bit.” Huh. A better deal? Okaaaaayyyyy. I can only assume when he says work, he means work outside the home — not the lesser valued, bob-bon fueled hobbies of raising children into productive adults and maintaining a household, which clearly should not be counted as actual work — maybe more of a recreational-type thing??

Another jem: “As women have brought more money into the marriage, their authority and decision-making power has grown,” said Andrew Cherlin, author of “The Marriage Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today.”

What these types of comments confirm for me is what I already know: To a large degree, as Americans we give much more value to “work” that brings in a paycheck than we do to what should fairly be recognized (but isn’t) as equally challenging and important work — raising children, for example — which brings moral and societal benefits and rewards (someone’s got to ready the workforce of tomorrow) but not often any dollars and cents to the marriage table.

The way I see it, it’s all about the balance of power, as Cherlin so indelicately put it. Whoever earns the most money gets the most power in the marriage, an equation replicated on a societal level. What I don’t understand is why we are so programmed to give more weight, or power, to the achievements which have a paycheck attached.

Yeah, we all need money. We need houses to live in and clothes to wear. We’ve got groceries to buy and cars to fuel and those overpriced soccer camps to think of. Raising families cost money, and it’s true today more than ever before that it’s harder to raise a family on just one income in this country. Some families don’t have the luxury to keep one parent — male or female — home to be with the children.

But why are we so focused on measuring, comparing, competing, our contributions this way? This mindset — that he OR she who “brings home the bacon” rules the roost, or at least deserves to strut around a little more — is counterproductive to a family-friendly society. And on the street level, it’s divisive to marriage.

In my own marriage, Mr. Punkernoodle and I have navigated this moat as we’ve gone. We started out as singles with him earning a higher wage, based on his experience. As a young married couple, there was a long stretch of time when I earned more than him. When our first daughter was born, I took maternity leave first, then he stayed home on paternity leave, then we both went back to work. Now, with two young daughters, I have been “at home” for the past year while he works an office job out-earning me (now and in my former career capacity) by a longshot.

In all of these various mutations, for the entire decade that we’ve been together, never have we felt that one vs. the other had or deserved to have more power within the relationship. Major decisions — from how to spend money to where to live and vacation — are made jointly. Smaller decisions can be made by either one of us; we both have the authority to make money decisions. There’s no “my money” or “his money.” It’s our money, regardless of who “earns” it — meaning whose name is on the payroll paycheck.

Because really, although right now my husband’s name is on that regular check (and thank god for the existence of that check), we BOTH earned most of that money. Why? Because like most “stay-at-home parents” in this country know, the ability of the spouse who leaves the home to find traditional career success depends largely on the support provided behind the scenes by their partner. It’s common sense: As an “outside worker,” the more secure I feel about the safety and happiness of my children, wherever they are, the better I can focus on succeeding at my career — and ostensibly the more money, security, benefits, and opportunities I can earn for my family.

Two stories on this topic stay with me:

An acquaintance of mine came to visit me in my diaper shop to research switching over to cloth diapers. She was a stay-at-home-mother (or a work-at-home-mother, to be exact, as she was bringing in extra income for her family with side jobs whenever she could squeeze in time between bottles and laundry). She had calculated that she was spending a large chunk of change every month on disposable diapers and that, for the cost of just eight weeks of diposables, she could buy many, many months’ worth of cloth diapers, which she was happy to use and launder herself. After crunching numbers and deciding it would be a good move, she looked and me and said, “Well, I’ll just have to check with [husband’s name] and see if I can get his OK.”

I was incredulous but managed to hide my amazement until I vented later that night to Mr. Punkernoodle. This woman had the important, designated job of household manager in her family. She bought and prepared the food, oversaw the children’s activities and understood the family budget. Yet because her name wasn’t on the pay stub, she didn’t have the authority to make a decision about something that fell squarely into the realm of her job description. She had to “check” with her husband to see if it was alright.

The other story: When we were married but not yet parents, we had a dinner date with another couple, friends of ours who had been married longer than we had and were expecting their first child. The parties in this other couple both had successful careers and were working and earning similar paychecks, and were of a mostly liberal mindset — supporters of human equality and all that good stuff. When it came time to pay the bill, we split it. The woman friend of ours reached for their half of the check and said casually to her husband, “I’ll get this.” “You sure?” he said. “Yes, you can get the next one,” she answered. Later that night, my husband and I whispered in bed to one another, marveling at how surprised we felt over our friends’ process of splitting expenses.

The thought simply would never have occurred to us — even then, with two individual paychecks, no kids and a lot more disposable income than we have now — to divide our money. Some feminists might whip me for this, lambast me for sloughing off all the hard-earned gains of the women’s movement. But I maintain it’s because of the feminist movement that I can now be in a place where I comfortably and equally share money with my partner. Whether what I bring to the marriage table is in the form of dollar bills or other, less tangible contributions, I know that it is equally as valuable as what my husband has to bring. And if down the road the tables turn and I earn more money and he eats more bons bons, he’ll still have free will over our checkbook.

And that’s what I wish would seep into our national consciousness a little more: That the measurement of contribution to family success should not be made in greenbacks alone. Maybe a start is to eliminate these overused and outdated colloquialisms we seem so hard-pressed to move beyond, phrases like “bring home the bacon,” which just reinforce money as the standard of success.

Keep the bacon, it’s just empty calories. Bring me true equality, which will feed us all in the long run.

The Sound of Monday Nights

This post was written for {Write} of Passage Challenge #6: Anne Lamott tells us, “Listen to your broccoli, and your broccoli will tell you how to eat it.” She’s referring to that inner voice that we hardly ever hear anymore. Today, take a few minutes to be still and quiet. Listen to your inner voice and write what she/he says. That’s it. Whatever it is that’s in there, let it out.

Tomorrow is garbage day. So tonight is garbage eve, which makes me think about death. Which makes me think about marriage. Which makes me think about life.

When we bought our house four years ago, we inherited The Old Lady Next Door. Dorothy, as I’ll call her, lives in a house about three inches from our own. Her tiny, one-story house is set all the way back on her property, taking up about 1/5 of her lot. The other 4/5 of her property amounts to a gigantic lawn stretching from said house down to the sidewalk. The first image I have of Dorothy is what I saw when I spied on her and the rest of the street from my kid’s upstairs bedroom window the summer we moved in.

Every morning that summer, Dorothy ambled out to the enormous lawn, which was deep, violent green and perfectly manicured. She spent hours crouched on her knees at the edge of the grass, pruning rose bushes, rearranging wood chips, polishing garden fairies and pulling out any errant weeds that dared to break the uniformity of her smooth grass carpet.

When she wasn’t lawn-grooming or looking after her husband, Dorothy walked her newly acquired companion, an edgy little Maltese I’ll call McDoodles, around the neighborhood. McDoodles was adopted and apparently had been mistreated at some point, Dorothy confided in us, because he seemed “a little” mistrusting of people. He also didn’t like other dogs, and we learned quickly that a hopeful sniff or excited slurp from our 40-pound Golden mutt resulted in an upswell of high-pitched barking and a sharp jump in Maltese blood pressure.

We tried to keep our dog away from McDoodles, we really did. But though she’s friendly and sweet, our dog has no street sense and suffered from a sad drop in obedience since our Punkernoodles came along and dethroned her from No. 1 Baby. So yeah, a few times she bust out the backyard and rushed over to McDoodles’ to see if maybe this time he had taken his meds and wanted to play. No harm was done, but McDoodles and Dorothy were both left in quite a state after these encounters. So much so that Dorothy decided to sic the Seattle dog-catcher on us.

I won’t go into the boring details of my interactions with the weird little man holding a yellow clipboard or how those interactions left me with some ungodly fines, nor will I makes excuses for letting my dog leave our property — bad neighborly behavior, I admit. Suffice it to say that, for a while, me and Dorothy weren’t the best of friends. No canning parties or gossip over the tea cozy.

Eventually, over the years, my bitterness thawed and we began saying hello over the laurel hedge. Dorothy brought our girls airport souvenirs from a trip she took and cooed at them on Halloween. We left Christmas cookies on her doorstep and shoveled her walkway in a snowstorm. Beyond her green thumb and her love of mentally challenged small fluffy dogs, I didn’t know much about her, nor did I think to find out.

Then, one dark dawn last spring, the spinning red lights of two fire trucks and an ambulance shone through my bathroom window. I peeked down onto the thick green lawn and watched as medical technicians filed through the screen door and, more than an hour later, carried Dorothy’s husband out on a stretcher. Word spread quickly down the street later that day: After years of ongoing health problems, he had died.

We all got information about the funeral, and I thought maybe I would try to go. I had learned Dorothy didn’t have any children and that much of her family was gone. But the kids got sick that week, and because I had nowhere to leave two snuffling whiny booger factories, I didn’t go. I remember, though, that the funeral was a Monday.

I remember because that night, after my kids were tucked into bed, the bills paid, and hubby and I had eaten ice cream and watched a few minutes of crap TV, I was washing my face in the bathroom. That’s when I heard the rolling.

We have a lot of garbage bins here in Seattle — one small square bin for actual trash, plus a large rolling green bin for yard waste and compost, and another large green rolling bin for recycling. The two big bins have to be rolled all the way from the back of the house down the driveway to the curb Mondays nights, in time for Tuesday morning pickup.

As I peeked out the rectangular bathroom window that night, I saw her, wearing sweats and slip-ons and slowly pushing her yard waste bin down the long driveway where her husband used to park their navy Lincoln after taking her on shopping trips or to dinner.

In that moment, as Dorothy rolled the trash to the curb on the day she buried her husband, a helplessness washed over me. I felt the fragility of life. The impermanence of our existence. One day you’re pruning your rose bushes or stubbornly ignoring your busybody neighbor, and the next day someone’s true love is gone forever.

And I think about that now, every week, when I hear the bins begin to roll along the driveways up and down our street, their black plastic wheels bumping and scratching over the pavement before coming to rest near the curb. Any Monday could be different than the Monday before.

Teaching the Tougher Things

Maybe it’s because of the promise I made myself around New Year’s – that I would try harder this year to appreciate the good stuff in my life and keep perspective when I feel like whining or complaining about something that feels completely crappy to me.

Or maybe it’s because of the god-awful Haiti headlines, which remind me how frustratingly random our fates as humans are, and how maddening it is to feel so removed from the ability to help – really help – our fellow humans in need.

But for whatever reason, after loading the girls into their car seats this morning and heading out into the morning school commute, I glanced at them in the rearview mirror and practically chirped, “What a beautiful day! I feel so happy to be here on this day, so lucky to have a warm house to live in and a good breakfast in my stomach and clothes to wear!”

Maybe I drank the coffee too fast. It’s been known to happen.

But Punkernoodle 1, in all her 4-year-old wisdom, donned her philosophical conductor’s hat and jumped right on my existential train.

“Isn’t it not fair, Mommy, that some people have no houses and have to sleep in tents in the forest, and we have a nice, big house to live in?”

Why yes, babe, it is frightfully, most fucked-upedly, unfair. And then I turned up the radio.

My friend asked me later this morning, “Did you tell your kids about Haiti?”

I hadn’t thought about it, but I realized no, I haven’t told them. In fact, I think I surreptitiously slid the front page of the newspaper underneath the sports section today and yesterday, gambling that they wouldn’t notice the pictures of bodies on stretchers and children their size covered in white dust with big, dazed stares.

We talk big all the time about how we want our children to become citizens of the world and all those other cross-cultural, priviledge-fueled catch phrases. But when it comes down to it, I am still at a loss to describe that which leaves me, an adult, with a sense of despair. Because I know, from my daughters’ innocent perspectives, it makes no sense. Why do some humans suffer so, while others glide through life which few truly harsh challenges? Why is there disease, natural disaster? Why, even when we have the resources and ability to help – as with our own community’s suffering – do we seem unable to alleviate the suffering that leaves the surprisingly wise and simplistic minds of our children baffled?

I feel guilty that the upside of an event so damaging as the earthquake in Haiti is a forceful yet admittedly temporary thankfulness for what’s good in my own life and the lives of my children: health, shelter, political freedom. Yet the reminder a major disaster brings is that nothing is guaranteed. It is a truth that is easier, and more blissful, to ignore than to accept and teach our children.

So while I’m feeling both helpless and grateful in the face of disaster, I’ll thank my friend Elizabeth, who reminded me with her simple question not to shelter my children too much from the realities of the planet. I will find a way to tell them, in terms they can handle, what happened in Haiti and enlist their marvelous and empathetic minds to find a way, a tiny way, in which our little family can help the condition of our fellow humans. After all, it’s our children to whom we will hand the burdens of humanity. It’s only fair they can start thinking about it now – there’s so much work to be done.

Badge of Same

It was a dark and stormy night. Mr. Punkernoodle was out-of-town on a boys’ camping trip. The girls had run me ragged all week. And oh yeah, it was Valentine’s Day.

So while Grandma babysat, I did what any exhausted 30-something mama with no date would: I slipped out to the local tattoo parlor.

Fiery dragon? Koi fish? Overused Om? Nope. I just pierced my nose.

Or, technically – and this is a Very Important Technicality – I re-pierced my nose. Years ago, back when all-nighters consisted of bar-hopping or finals cramming instead of breastmilk letdowns and potty training, I had my nose pierced for the first time. It was a diamond stud, which was speared into my nostril’s soft outer tissue at a piercing place in San Francisco by a guy named Dungeon. My best friend Suzanne, usually way cooler than me, had come along for support, and I reveled in the awe with which she regarded me after Dungeon did his (painful) deed and we sauntered excitedly down the streets of downtown San Fran. I was 18 and I felt like some hot shit.

I loved my new piercing. But for some reason my employer, The Great Coffee Company That Shall Not Be Named, did not. (Let’s not even discuss how, nowadays, you can’t even order a skinny two-sugar caramel low-foam extra-hot latte without staring at some wannabe anarchist’s quarter-sized earlobe holes, hot-iron brandings and indigo ink work snaking up the neck ). So eventually I caved, pulled my diamond stud out and joined the rat race. I’ve longed for that piercing ever since.

But Grown-Up Life happened. Interviews, then jobs at newspapers where I tried to get middle-aged city councilmen to take me seriously. None seemed the proper place for the nose piercing. By the time I felt secure enough in my career to be more expressive with my appearance, I was pregnant, nursing – not in the mood to poke an unecessary hole in myself.

Then, last year, on that dark and rainy night, I decided the time had come. I had recently quit my day job to spend more time with my hooligans. I was writing and slinging cloth diapers on the side — neither seemed an occupation where the people I interacted with gave the least shit about what I looked like. In fact, I figured, the twinge of anti-establishment a facial piercing communicated confirmed that I fit right into place in the new world I found myself in. And oh yeah — I really didn’t care anymore what people thought. I had proven myself already, so if I wanted a little hole in my nose I deserved it. Happy Valentine’s Day to me.

Mr. Punkernoodle was suitably unimpressed. My mom, recalling my first piercing (which she had forbidden me to get but had then learned to love) congratulated me. My little girls begged to touch the new diamond stud. I would not be the lame mother who dressed in old-lady outfits and shook my head at the crazy youth of today — I would set an example for them of personal self-expression!

And then, just as my ego was beginning to ascend to pre-adulthood heights, I discovered what a shopworn stereotype I had actually become.

Apparently I hadn’t noticed them before, but now that I had proudly re-pierced my nose, I saw them everywhere: Other thirtysomething mothers just like me, refugees from the 9-5 corporate world who happily switched out their Banana Republic suits for yoga pants and hemp outfits with lots of slouchy, earthy layers, wearing the same tiny diamond stud. As I began to spot them — at library storytime, in line at the natural grocery, in my own shop buying sustainable cloth diapers for their avant-garde babies — I began to wonder: Was there a single mother of young children in all of Seattle without a stupid stud in her nose??? The truth hit with the force of a two-year-old in full tantrum mode: I had become a freakin’ cliché.

And damn it, it wasn’t fair! I had first pierced my nose a decade-and-a-half ago, back when it was a unique form of expression, at least in my circles. I was cheated out of my piercing by the cruel and conventional work world — I lost my chance to enjoy it when it was unorthodox — and now here I was, ready to reclaim it and in doing so, I had instead given myself something that was absolutely banal. (No offense meant to the hundreds of women I know now and am friends with who have the same diamond stud. Really, ladies, it looks killer on all of us. I am not mad at you personally — you should be free to break out of your own stereotypical mommy chains and pierce whatever you darn well want to. And hey — maybe some of you had a first go-round in your teen years, too, and rightly deserve this comeback as I do).

And of course this experience leads me to ponder identity — my identity as a woman and as a mother, how those are entertwined yet sometimes pulling against each other. Intellectually, I know how I look doesn’t dictate who I am. Emotionally and egotistically, I am fighting against centuries of women’s conflict over their identities, self-proscribed and otherwise, and their roles within their family and society.

So. I am torn. I still love my piercing. I like how it looks, bringing a bit of sparkle to my regular, usually unadorned face. I like how it feels in there, a little metal touchstone that glistens in the corner of my eye as I type on my computer or scrub my hair in the shower. I know, a tiny stud is not, like, way out there on the rebel spectrum. The 13-year-olds are probably laughing at me all the way to the body-mutilation parlors. But it is my little connection to some of the things I have lost from my youth.

So it stays. Count me the same as all the other pierced mothers dragging their screaming toddlers in and out of the playdates and the cupcake shoppes. Judge us as ubiquitous as pet owners with doggy purses and bank executives with fatty bonus checks. I don’t really care.

My ego pierced, this diamond stays.

Ode to (Our) Eggs

Apparently Benjamin Franklin once said that “an egg today is better than a hen tomorrow.” Or else it was a Turkish proverb; that Internet thingy is tricky with quotes. Either way, I think it’s true. Lately I have pondered the simplicity of the egg. Eggs have become a staple in our house over the past 8 months, ever since the seven tiny chicks we bought for $2 each in early spring last year started laying. As an animal husbandry novice (ok either I’m being kind to myself or that’s a perverse understatement), I had no idea what to expect from our urban flock of girls (I’ll break here for a quick paean to the eighth bird, a handsome silky rooster whose only real fault was hitting puberty — we miss you, Little Rooster Bill, we really do).

The birds arrived to the delight of our kids, and although I had no clue what I was doing, Mr. Punkernoodle — who grew up on a ranch with lots of chickens — and our neighbor and friend, who is a city girl like me but somehow seemed right away to be perfectly at home cooling off broody hens and raking up muddy poop, got the coop/mansion situated and the flock into a rhythm. Then the magic happened, and it almost hasn’t stopped since.

The girls produced quickly and reliably — we’ve averaged around five eggs a day across the seasons. Some days we get seven eggs from seven hens. The brood took a break in December, something we learned was normal from The Seattle Farm Cooperative, a group we found that connects people practicing small-scale farming and raising poultry and livestock within our urban area. Mr. Punkernoodle set the coop/mansion up with a small indoor warming light to shield the hens from cooler temps and an outdoor light in the yard to trick them into thinking daylight doesn’t end at 4:30 p.m., which we think helped encourage them to start back up with production after Christmas.

Eggs have a new value when they come from your own flock and, by extension, your own hard work (from coop upkeep to the cost of chicken food to the preparation and collection of kitchen scraps that keep the eggshells hard and the girls excited about a varied diet). I don’t think we actually save much money by growing our own eggs, but it’s been satisfying to get so close to our food, to be able to cut out that ambiguous grocery-store middle step for what’s become a reliable source of protein and yummy meals.

And that’s the thing: I’ve realized that as a busy person trying to juggle two picky kids, chaotic work and school schedules, a home business and my own selfish pursuits, I love eggs. I love them because they are fast, and they can be turned into breakfast, lunch and dinner plus used to bake dessert when you have unexpected guest or a desperate need for chocolate cake. Some great things that have become of our homegrown eggs: Something I have termed “French breakfast” – thick-cut fresh bread (preferably Tall Grass Bakery bread) topped with 2 cracked eggs, salt and pepper, and grated Gruyère, layered in individual oval-shaped bakeware and placed under the boiler on low for 10 minutes ’til the whites are cooked, the yolks still runny and the Gruyère bubbling — amazing. Semi-crunchy sprouted corn tortillas topped with melted cheese, a fried egg, a sprinkling of black beans and green onion shavings, avocado slices and a dollop of sour cream and hot sauce. Weekend Northwest Quiche with smoked salmon, local goat cheese, fresh dill and local crème fraîche. And creamy cheesecake with salted caramel topping.

The chickens were part of a project we undertook last year as a family to eat more of our food form local sources. And I’m glad they’ve worked out so well because otherwise we might be regarded right now as having catapulted off the wagon (I swear I’m going to go back to the farmer’s market starting this Sunday, no matter how much freezing, moldy, sideways bone-chilling rain is pelting down. I swear).

To be honest, the hens still mystify me a little bit — my 4-year-old happily shoves her arm under those warm feathered asses to grab the sometimes poop-covered eggs, while I have to take a deep breath and inch myself through it. But I am amazed at the satisfaction of seeing those little white and pink orbs pile up in the fridge and the proud crack they give on their way to becoming sustenance for my family. Thanks, girls.

A Look Back…

This post was written for the {W}rite of Passage Writing Well Challenge #4:  The Resolution

On New Year’s Day I had a flashback. We were at Salmon Bay Park with the girls, ringing in 2010 as we pushed them on the swings and listened to them squeal across the tire-tipped zip-line in elated terror. As we played among the other parents and young children, a couple walked up and stood at the edge of the playground. They held hands as they strolled, and the mother held their newborn in a carrier on her chest.

This couple had no older child, just the baby sleeping in a bundle of fleece. But they had walked to the park, where they stopped and stood, then sat on the wooden bench. There, with faint smiles on their faces, they watched the children screech around the merry-go-round and pound their fists into the sand. It might have seemed to someone else watching that the couple was out-of-place, maybe waiting for someone to meet them — a grandparent to come along with the other child, a preschooler who had true business at a playground.

But I felt I knew just why they were there, gazing dreamily at the playsets and blur of small sneakered feet rushing past.

Nearly 5 years ago, my husband and I made a trek to a different playground. That park was three blocks from our tiny city house, and as we walked slowly I pushed the complex pale blue stroller/car seat/carrier combo that held our week-old daughter. We had decided to take her to the park to celebrate her 1-week birthday. I chuckle now at the sweetness of it, the new-parent excitement and innocence that brimmed in us as we set out that day, so eager for that first trip to the playground with our first child. Of course our baby, snuggled into the contraption, the sun shield covering her completely, slept right through her visit, and it would be nearly two years before she could understand and fully appreciate the fun a playground has to offer. 

But we couldn’t wait, so eager were we to experience the moments of childhood we imagined as miraculous through a parent’s eye. The world had changed so much with the birth of our child — holy cow, we were mother and father! Suddenly the gap between the magic of our own childhoods and the responsible monotony that adulthood sometimes dictates was bridged. How long had it been since we went to the playground? A decade? Since we sat down and dug in the sand with a plastic shovel, pumped our legs as we swung higher and higher into the sky? We realized, a little embarrassed but mostly enchanted, that we could do these things once again: Mud pies, glue sticks, Disneyland, hula hoops, hide-and-seek — we would get another chance at all of these as we held our child’s hand and showed her the wonder of life. And, one week after her birth, the fantasy had begun and we just couldn’t wait.

On New Year’s Eve, at the end of a decade, we both reflected upon all that has changed over the past 10 years. Where did the time disappear to? Is it possible that our newborn daughter whose cheek caught the summer breeze in the park that day is now a talking, jumping firecracker ready to start school? And that our second daughter’s babyhood came and went while we weren’t looking?

In that couple, pausing at Salmon Bay to marvel their life and the possibilities it holds, I saw how fast time passes. How excited we are to keep moving forward and pushing ahead, to get to the next thing, the next stage, so we can see how it is, how we like it. Then we plow ahead once more.

As a parent I want to try to hold every stage, every moment, in my mind and taste it with my memory. But I forget. I rush. I obsess over the next thing, the next phase. I itch to push ahead. What I would give to just peek into my daughter’s stroller that warm day at the park years ago, to see her wrinkled cheek and the dark patch of hair. To hear her whimper-breath, which knew nothing of swings and climbing walls but everything, everything about life.

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