One of the high and low points of my month away from blogging was a trip N (my husband) took to Memphis for a conference. It was a high because normally N and I spend a lot of time talking in the evenings, but with him gone, I was able to get a ton of writing done. I cranked into productivity mode and just glued myself evenings and naptimes to this screen. The result was an enormous boost of momentum and morale on my book.

The trip was a low point of the month because, well, who wants their sweetheart gone for 5 days? And to be 100% ON for childcare for that long? Please don’t pick me.

The first day N was away I looked at the days of his absence stretching off toward the horizon and got a little woozy. Our son is 17 months old. That’s old enough to know how to climb and reach and object vociferously to whatever he finds objectionable, but young enough to not have words to explain himself, or reason with which to navigate the many decisions with which he finds himself confronted. Will I eat any of the ten things offered me at dinnertime, or will I rub them into my forehead? Will I unroll the entire roll of toilet paper while mom is grabbing something from the bathroom, or will I bolt into her bedroom and try to wedge myself between the wall and the weight bench? These are the types of dilemmas the average 17-month-old is bound to face.

So you can imagine how necessary it could feel to me to have physical and moral support around the house every day. At least a portion of every day.

So like I said, I looked ahead and felt woozy, and then looked down at my son, whose forehead wound from where a seed pod punctured it is almost healed. He patted my knee sweetly and smiled like I was the best thing since the watering can he discovered last week. And I thought to myself: this is a really sweet moment. Just a sweet, sweet moment.

Things went remarkable smoothly as that day progressed, and a couple of hours later another moment happened. I was sitting on the living room floor, eating an apple, and Elijah came and straddled my knees, which were extended out in front of me. He waited for a bite of the apple and quietly nibbled until it was time for another, when he opened his mouth like a bird. He was so sweet, and so happy to be sitting there, that I could not help laughing. “This is another moment,” I thought.

And would you know it? but moments kept happening all over the place, and before I knew it I had a sack full. I did this every day of N’s absense, and discovered that the more moments I recognized, the more they began bleeding into each other, so that by late afternoon of even day four, I wasn’t thinking to myself, “Wow, that’s 7 moments today,” but rather, “This is turning out to be a really great day.”

Isn’t this magic? How you don’t have to have grandiose hopes for the best day ever, or even the best hour, but can just keep your eyes open for moments, and maybe discover that all those tiny insignificances–often only seconds or milliseconds long, maybe just the way the sunlight catches a tree, or that lady’s bright red laces–actually turn into something you’d only ever dreamed of: a way more than tolerable day?

I think parents and caregivers need magic like this, but I think everyone else does too. I think moments are what can make lifetimes beautiful.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 6th, 2007 at 12:47 pm and is filed under Motherhood, Mindfulness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.