remembering

Have you ever been at the grocery store trying to wrangle all your kids and get groceries at the same time and an older person says to you, "Enjoy this time.  It goes so fast."  And you think, "Yeah right.  I'm really enjoying telling my kids they can't have every colorful item they see and keeping them from getting run over by other shopping carts, all the while trying to keep the binky in the baby's mouth and keep my cart from running into anything."

People tell me that all the time.  My dad just said those very words to me last week after a break down about putting my naughty children to bed.  And even through times like at the grocery store, or amid a teary defeat, I still kinda believe them because I know how fast they grow up.  McKay was pretty much born yesterday and I blinked and he's five with two little sisters.

Another thing people always say is that someday we'll look back on the time when we were the poorest and realize that it was the best time in your life.  This one I haven't really experienced yet.  I can't imagine looking back on this time and thinking it was the best in my life.  This time in my life has been hard.  Really hard.  There are some days when I hate this time in my life and can't wait to be done with it.

What I look back on now is the time we spent in our little condo.  Life was so uncomplicated then.  Brian was a nurse.  He made enough for us to live a nice little life in a nice little condo.  I had two kids that I could manage easily.  They were little enough where my biggest problems were how to get McKay to eat vegetables and if Ellery was sleeping through the night.  Everything seemed to be just so and our life could be tied up in a tidy little package.

Now, we are still poor. . .poorer, even.  And my kids are still little.  But our lives have gotten more complicated.  I worry about peer pressure for my kids.  I worry about their physiological and social development now, instead of just physical.  I worry about outside influences on them.  I worry about my husband and the pressure and stress he is under.  I worry about him trying to meet all the needs in his life- school, clinicals, scouts, kids, me, himself.  I worry about keeping a marriage strong and healthy when so many other things are demanding our attention.  I worry about how we're accumulating a hefty little student loan and about paying that off someday.  I worry about where we're going to get a job and how it's all going to work when we're done.  And most of all, I worry about how I am going to raise three children by myself when Brian is away throughout the next year and a half.  This worry looms ahead of me like a dark, shadowy mass and although my strategy so far has been to not even think about it, I'm afraid that's not working anymore.  I think about it constantly.  Every time I feel like I'm drowning in children, or when I have a million things to do and Layla is crying, or when I have to do bedtime by myself-  I think about it.  And I'm really scared.  

I'm trying to enjoy this time.  My kids are growing by the second.  I think about Layla and how much she's grown in just her short three months of life.  It goes so fast.  But enjoying this time does not always come easy.  Sometimes I have to really try.  Sometimes I don't enjoy it.  A lot of the time I do.  But it's also hard for me to not live my life waiting for when we're done.  When we're settled.  When life isn't so stressful.  But I have a feeling that if I continue "waiting" for that, I'm going to be waiting for a long time.  Perhaps life won't ever really settle down.  There will always be stress in life.  I know that.  

So I wonder, when people give the advice to enjoy the time when your kids are little and enjoy the time when you have no money, perhaps what they long for is the time when life was more simple.  When there wasn't a lot of "stuff," both physical and mental, crowding their life.  When they weren't stretched too thin and life wasn't complicated.

Because, right now, that's exactly what I'm longing for.

*The blessing, and I do mean blessing, of Layla's arrival in our family is something I would never, ever change. . .even with the added stress.  I hope this doesn't read the wrong way in regards to her.  I'm seriously and quite desperately in love with her.  My baby.  I thank Heavenly Father that He sent her to me every day.