I woke up this morning and realized I was almost forty.
I wasn’t wondering which of my friends was pregnant. I wasn’t flipping through my calendar, charting days, wondering about getting pregnant again, or plotting future investments in pregnancy clothes, cloth diapers, or nursing bras. Baby Gap ads weren’t tugging at me, calling my ovaries out of slumber. And I was handing back my squishy, sweet-smelling baby niece without a hitch.

I realized with quiet, striking joy that I’m past the newborn stage of motherhood and knee deep in the grade school stage. The water’s fine, really. Thank goodness the teenage years aren’t here yet.

Because now it’s our turn to pack the school lunches. The turkey sandwiches, cheese sticks, and chocolate chip cookies, homemade or not. We fold white napkins in half alongside a water bottle. And we tuck our hearts into our children’s backpacks, too, hoping our kids know, somehow, that where ever they go, our hearts follow, too. Whether our kids are making swan sculptures in art class, running loops around the field in P.E., or standing alone on the black top at recess, they are never, truly, alone.

It’s our turn to sit alongside our reluctant grade schoolers doing homework we, too, would be reluctant to do. We sharpen number two pencils, trot through spelling lists, give pep talks (just as often to ourselves), and somehow find a way to do it.

We buy our seven-year-old daughter new black patent leather Mary Janes and turn around a few months later, finding they don’t fit anymore. And the carefully stowed arts and crafts from preschool, once unearthed from our garage last summer, now look like artifacts from the local Children’s Museum. And we’re surprised.

Are we living towards the day our children leave us?

Someday, like leaves falling from the family tree, they will scatter to college in another state, maybe a mission in another country. Life, marriage, and careers may whisk them away to other cities, maybe close by, maybe not.

Then it will be their turn. Their turn to birth and breastfeed and rock and raise children. Their turn for late nights with sick children on the cold tile bathroom floor, and later mornings when PBS cartoons and video games are your best friend because they mean a few more minutes of precious sleep.

But for now it’s our turn. Still. Stretching out in front of us, endless, a stream of todays and tomorrows.

Like we anticipated a ride at a fair, we anticipated these, our children. We waited in line, scratching our bellies with impatience. And now, blinking, we realize, in the heat of this blazing season of parenting, our turn is going to be over before we know it. It’s out of our hands, really. Breathless, we want it to end, exhausted with the giving of it. But, when we dip into our hearts, we find that everything else in us whispers, “No, let it stretch out, let me hold it a little while longer.”

Hunter S. Thompson once stated, “Buy the ticket, take the ride.” I have. I’ve got my ticket, I’m on the ride. It’s called Motherhood. And I wouldn’t miss it for the world.

~Teressa Wellborne