TO REMEMBER

I always thought that someday I would print out a copy of my blog to save all the funny stories and photos in a hard-copy book. After looking into the process through a variety of sources, I decided I would have neither the time to format, nor the money to fund such an endeavor. Every year we print about 100 photos from the previous year and add it to our photo albums. I decided recently to go through my blog and caption the photos with some of the funny captions and print out the stories and laminate and insert them between the photo album pages.

This is turning out to be a laborious process. I've been going backward, and the further back I go, the more emotionally straining it is. It is difficult for me to read so many years of posts that were phrased negatively or were in essence complaining. It is difficult for me to read about my frustrations that I most assuredly softened for public perusal. It cuts me to know that my anger and stress and frustration and helplessness over what to do was so much sharper than I let on to be.

Going through these old photos and posts brings up a particularly difficult part of being a parent. Many of us live in a perpetual state of regret. You feel, each day, like you are failing to meet your own expectations, but that there was not a better way you could have handled it in the moment. Time passes and inevitably the circumstances of "today" fade from remembrance. You look at these photos, you forget who you were and what your burdens were and all you see is the failure to take advantage of situations that are now lost to you forever. You end up feeling helpless against fixing your mistakes and you hold yourself to an impossible bar in the present, and in the past.

I held my baby to impossible standards. I held myself to impossible standards. I was too inexperienced to understand this and very confident in my ability to find the elusive "correct" way to parent. What I see now is a baby who needed to be held more, a mother who needed to rest more, and the massive bank of understanding and compassion that I was lacking.

The only constant here is time and recognition that I'll forget the circumstances of individual days. As long I can recognize that I can only try my best, it is easier to think "How will I wish I would have acted in the future?" and then try to live that way.

The regret can become overwhelming and in some twisted way comforting to wallow in. It can pull downward and spiral into embarrassment, regret, and disappointment in myself. The regret can, however, tug at me whenever my babies NOW ask me to hold them or snuggle them or play with them or let them help or read them a book, etc. And then in the now I can take advantage of these situations.

I've never met a parent who has thought they really nailed that child raising bit. This somehow doesn't make regret easier. Matthew and I are trying to remind each other that this is the game we're playing. We're going to continue to make the wrong choices, but if we can live in the present and try to be the person we want to remember with fondness, it may help us to make the right choices today.

We will try to remember to live as many moments as we can as if we traveled back in time to relive and improve this particular day.

And I will try to remember that crying over their baby photos doesn't fix not holding them enough. I will just go and hug them now.