The Years Nobody Prepares You For

I really feel like it snuck up on me. One day I was in the thick of raising my kids—diapers, endless meal prep, dress up clothes and little toys everywhere—and then just like that it was all over. No, this isn’t about sending my kids off to college, this is what happens when you and your babies aren’t that young anymore.

I’m turning 40 this year and although the term is so cliché it makes me cringe, I think that technically makes me eligible for a mid-life crisis. Like most things in my life that I was woefully unprepared for, I thought I was impervious to its affects because it was all about the wrinkles, the road not taken, the dreams not fulfilled and I thought as a woman of faith and someone who ‘really knows what life is about’, I didn’t need to worry about it.  Then I sent my youngest of three children off to full-day Kindergarten, and the feelings of loss and uselessness flattened me with a vicious sucker punch.

What I think hits me hardest about nearing 40 is that I didn’t realize how my family would also be changing as I approached middle age. Maybe it’s crazy, but I feel like my kids are middle-aged too.  They’re certainly not babies—my oldest is 11, the middle is 9 and my youngest is 6—but they’re not old enough to be out on their own yet either so we’re all stuck in this nebulous in-between stage.

My oldest child has already started the long and painful process of separating from us, even as we both cling to the tenuous threads that bind us to each other and her childhood. She’s nearly as tall as I am but still stands at the kitchen counter quickly shifting her weight from side to side in little pigeon-toed dance steps when she’s making a snack she’s really excited about. But then there are the times where she fights with us because she doesn’t want to come to the movies to see Frozen 2 or when she prefers to be in her room alone rather than climb into bed with us while we read aloud a chapter of “A Christmas Carol.” .The younger two are still hanging in there but I know now it’s only a matter of time.

Everyone has advice for you in the first few years of childhood, and everyone from your mom to strangers in the grocery store delight in telling you how fast it goes. They dub these the “best years of your life” even as you stare back at them through sleep-deprived eyes while holding back the tears of despair from the relentlessness of it all.  They’re not wrong, but there is so much more that they’re just not saying.

I always pictured the advice to “enjoy it now” was a well-meaning warning to take it all in now before they’ve flown the nest with marriages, mortgages and kids of their own. What I didn’t know then was that the years of wistfully reminiscing about sweet-smelling baby heads and little girls in too-big Tinkerbell heels were just around the corner for me. While I could picture myself clutching their favorite stuffed animal on their first night away at college, I didn’t know how soon I’d be clearing out the playroom and sobbing over getting rid of a once-favorite but now long-forgotten Strawberry Shortcake McDonald’s toy (I wish that was a made-up example but it isn’t).

There are no “What To Expect” books for this age, nor are there touching posts on Facebook to reflect on when things get ugly. These are the years that nobody prepares you for—the heartache, the triumph, the regret, the fear—are all rolled up in this little bundle that unfurls itself in the second half of your life and their childhood. I hope to survive them and when I do, I’ll impart that wisdom to you along the way. While I may not have all the answers, I promise be here to see you through even as the grocery-store sages become scarce in the years no one prepare you for.