My baby turns five tomorrow.

I just got back from his little birthday party at school. I brought juice boxes and ice cream, Avengers napkins and Spiderman balloons, and Ezra was tickled pink. I stuck five long, colorful birthday candles into his little plastic cup of ice cream and sang Happy Birthday with all his friends. Then I watched him pass out his goody bags to his buddies, so proud in his little blue polo shirt and gray uniform shorts. I took pictures of him with his teachers, and they took a picture of us. Before I left his classroom, he gave me a hug that said more than a million thank yous, his arms tight around my neck in an embrace that lasts twice as long as a usual Ezra hug.

I cried all the way home.

Time does funny things to you when you’re a mother. It drags on through late night feedings and fevers, through long afternoons when everyone’s waiting for daddy to get home. It speeds through the holidays and birthdays, the cozy days of family routine. Time makes you emotional and antsy, nostalgic and impatient, all depending on the day or the phase we’re going through at the moment.

But bring me to a birthday, and I’ll always say that time is going too fast. I look at my son and wonder how he is five, how he is in school, passing out treats to his friends, so grown-up and handling his own little life outside the walls of our home. I look at this little miracle walking around in front of me and still wonder: how did you come to be? How is it possible that you are mine?

Being a mother feels strange and new to me all the time, because my children are constantly growing and changing, on to the next thing. I tell my daughter regularly, “You can stop growing now. That’s enough.” To which she smiles at me in an incredibly perceptive way for a seven and a half year old, knowing I’m having a “moment” and indulges me with an extra squeeze. She’s got a little bit of mother in her already.

I don’t know if my husband and I will have any more children. It’s something I pray about all the time. Are we done? Or is there another on the way? Is this it? Is this the last five year old party I’ll have? Is this the last naptime and Sesame Street and plastic sippy cup? I try to peer into the future, unable to let go of the idea of having another child, unable to say, “Let’s try again!”

Being in this place and coming to a benchmark like five years old has me feeling sad, has me wondering and questioning and fearing, “Is this it?” So I sit here with a glass of wine, biting my lip, and whilst trying-to-be brave, listing things I’m grateful for right now:

1. My beautiful son. I’m so thankful for my Ezra, Ezzie, Mr. Ezra Pants, Tank, SpiderTank, Ez Fez, Underwear Man!, E-Z, Buzz, boy of a million nicknames. How do you say thank you when God gives you a son, a human who loves you unconditionally and calls you “mom,” and comes in every single morning, first thing, to cuddle? Who yells down the stairs every night after I tuck him in, “Don’t let the bed bugs bite! or the sharks! or the Ninja Turtles! or the spiders! or the snakes! or the Hulk! or the….” Who still hugs me in front of his classmates, is gleeful when I draw him my funny stick figure superheroes?

2. The opportunity to be a mother. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and probably the hardest thing I’ll ever do. It’s knocked me over a million times, been the impetus for many long, hot baths, and taught me more about love than anything else. The whole thing is a big messy miracle. Great gobs of grace and snot and laundry and sweet, sweet baby cheeks.

3. Time. It’s ticking, always passing. But it’s what we have, however long, and it’s a gift. The more I try to peer into the future, the more I learn the wisdom of staying right here, in the present. Celebrating the moments or just trying to breathe through them, one at a time. Right here is where I learn to sit still in the palm of God’s hand, sheltered by his love, comforted by his control. The intricacies of his timing are beyond my understanding, but looking back on the last five years, I see the perfection in the way his hand moves.

“I started writing when I was seven or eight. I was very shy and strange-looking, loved reading above everything else, weighed about forty pounds at the time, and was so tense that I walked around with my shoulders up to my ears, like Richard Nixon.” 

-Ann Lamott, Bird by Bird

If you saw me lately, you might mistake me for Richard Nixon.

Let’s just say I’m feeling overwhelmed. For the last few weeks, when someone has asked me how I’m doing, the only thing I want to say is “busy,” because it’s the only thing I can think about. The days are rushing over me, and I over them, like a slightly crazy, frazzled Richard Nixon in what I think are a pair of very cute pointy toe pumps.

The blood that is running through my veins is jumpy, my neck and shoulders are achy from the strain of hours in front of the keyboard, my jaw is set with the determination of a general about to attack. And my heart is beating too fast.

As long as I am complaining, let me give you the reasons I feel this way. I am a mother with two children. My son is having a hard time right now, and we’re trying to make it through with love and discipline and a crazy new diet to help with his allergies. This requires lots of cooking and large quantities of something called bone broth. I have a job, and I just popped the top off a whole can of worms there. I’m trying to keep up with this blog, the housework, the birthday parties, the bills, the homework. I am writing our Advent by Candlelight program. I’m also supposed to be a wife, and I don’t think I’m doing a very good job with that one. But I’ve let myself off the hook a little, because he’s busy, too, and hasn’t been around much lately. I’m trying to be a good friend and sister and daughter. All I really want to do is jump in the van and take a long drive up the coast to Maine. My daydream fantasies are of me alone in a cabin in the mountains with a wide front porch, a cozy sweater, a mug of coffee, a rocking chair, and absolute quiet for a few days. I fantasize about it.

I am constantly worried that there are not enough hours in the day. When I climb into bed, I have the funny feeling of deja vu, like I just cliimbed into bed ten minutes ago, when really it was 24 hours ago.

On Friday night, I lost it. I was with a friend, discussing something, and all of a sudden, I just fell apart. I had reached my saturation point, and the tears leaked out of me. Big, fat tears and lots and lots of words. It was a little bit horrifying, but she sat with me and said all the right things and cried along with me and we both came out laughing at how life is just plain hard and good, ugly and beautiful. On Saturday, my husband graciously took the kids to a volleyball game, and I spent four hours zoned out in front of a movie in my yoga pants.

I’m a crash-and-burn kind of girl. I can go for miles. “Fine. Fine. Fine!” “Yes. Yes. Yes!” and then suddenly, it’s totally not fine, and I find myself burned up. Fried crispy.

But this latest meltdown got me thinking about what I could change and what needed to stay the same. I will always be a mother. I’m keeping my job and the blog and my husband. I will continue to cook and clean and pay the bills and help at church. Life will continue to be busy.

But I decided that a few things have to change. Instead of always answering, “Busy!” I can say good, because when I stop to think about it, all this busy-ness is the result of so much goodness: my husband, our children, a fulfilling job working for a school I love, finally having some quiet time to write like I’ve always wanted, the use of a strong body to volunteer and do dishes and blow up balloons for a TMNT birthday party. Cowabunga, dude.

I can practice gratitude, just like I said I would this month. I can be thankful, because even though I don’t always think I have enough time, I do have hours. I have 24 hours every single day. These hours, no matter how busy, are a blessing. Every single hour is an opportunity to complain or to be grateful, to take up the calling before me or to begrudge it. And every hour is a chance to exercise my faith, whether that be praying to God for help or praising him for the opportunities in front of me.

Sometimes 24 hours seem like too many, sometimes those 24 hours don’t seem like enough. But 24 hours is what God gives me, one day at a time, as gift of his grace.

I Facetimed with my mom and dad a couple days ago, hedged in some conversation around my kids clamoring for the screen and making crazy faces and showing off their latest tricks and toys and missing teeth. It must be like watching a circus. But in between the shenanigans, mom and dad asked how I was. Coming from someone you love, “How are you?” can open large cans of worms.

I gave a stream of consciousness answer. “Good. Work is going well. The kids are good. Ryan is good.” And then I dug in a little deeper. “It’s busy, we’re all busy. Time is flying by. We are entrenched in the school year routine, our calendars runneth over. Now that I’m almost full time, it’s the kids and the house and the job and everything else, too.” I then I found the heart of what I wanted to say, “But I feel settled. This feels like home.”

There’s something so satisfying at getting to the heart of what you’re feeling, isn’t there? Even more satisfying is to have someone understand what you mean. My mom replied, “It’s like the Lincoln years.” I knew what she meant. Our Lincoln years were the years that my family lived in Nebraska. Those ten years were a sweet pocket of time when my sisters and I were growing up, all together under one roof with my mom and dad. The Lincoln years are my childhood, a time when I most definitely felt settled. My parents, in the heart of their parenting years, felt the grounding force of a routine focused on kids and school and holidays and summer vacations and the hum of family life. I hear the sweet satisfaction in their voices when they talk about those years, set between their own just-starting-out years and the years when we were all teenagers, upsetting the nest, and then college kids, jumping out of it.

After my teens and the searching years of my twenties and the series of moves and personal shake-ups of the past few years, I feel settled like I haven’t felt for a very long time. Where I am feels like home. I feel connected to the deep purpose of mothering and the satisfaction of a job that I love. My husband and I, after 10 years of marriage, have a bond and a routine and a history that makes the foundation of our family. We have good friends. We feel a sense of mission in our church and school. Now that we’ve been in Miami two years, familiarity surrounds us and this place has a worn-in feeling. All of this contributes to an overall feeling of settledness.

And for that, I’m grateful. Thank you, Lord, for bringing me to this time and this place.

What makes it all the sweeter, of course, is that life is ever-changing. So I’m treasuring this sweet pocket of stillness, these Lincoln-years, for as long as they last.