The delightful mayonnaise-breaking baby known to these interwebs as Junior Jr. is 18 months old today!

There is, in my current opinion, nothing better than an 18-month-old baby.  They’re really not a baby – that brain is thinking thoughts so dense I couldn’t possibly understand.  That busy little body has PLANS to execute.  Sense of humor? Positively esoteric.  But at the same time, this creature who continues to wake me up nights, clutching his crib quilt in an overhead fist, hungrily reaching up for me in the pre-dawn shadows – definitely still a baby.

I’m in no hurry for him to grow up, or his brother.  In fact, the older I get, I’m in significantly less of a hurry for anything.  By the time the urgencies of my children’s personal lives crescendo into the peak that is teenagerhood, I will be moving at rapid sloth pace.

Maybe we’ll live on a farm by then and my zen-like stupor won’t be so noticeable.  Not being in a hurry for kids to grow up doesn’t mean this season is easy, or fun, or cute.  It can be fun, and the kids are cute; but the days and nights are grueling.  The Hubs and I are getting less cute every day – they call it beauty sleep for a reason.  Childrearing, in many moments, seems like something only a lunatic would attempt. So I fully felt the bittersweetness of these words this week:

The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is today. – Chinese proverb

Whatever good work you’re doing these days, keep at it, at however slow a pace you may be doing it.  Whatever good work you need to start doing, tell the voice that keeps mentioning how you should have already done it to shush.  Yes, you could’ve left that job, sobered up, fermented that kimchi, reached out to that friend, whatever it is before now.  Doesn’t mean you can’t start today.  Time is not linear but expansive when we are moving in the flow of our true selves.  And it is this out-of-time-ness that generously swallows our failures and waits for us to start again, as many times as necessary.  Think of that pot bellied baby, swaggering around, climbing the furniture and falling off, chortling and babbling a language of secret joy.

Embrace your soft, courageous, 18-month-old self, explorer of worlds, eager to share all that you can pick up and put in your mouth. Baby-people are in no hurry except to be themselves.  The best time to do that is today.

Post #10 of 40 Daze: A Lenten Writing Practice.