Unspoken Truth

“Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.”
— Elizabeth Stone

It is September again.

My social media is filling up with first-day-of-school pictures. Kids standing on the front steps with backpacks that look too big for their bodies. Little signs telling us which grade they are starting in. Parents marking another beginning while quietly wondering how the hell another year disappeared so quickly.

I remember those pictures.

I remember new shoes, school supplies, and trying to get everyone out the door on time. I remember the excitement and the nerves. The first days that eventually became last first days, although I am not sure I understood that while I was living them.

You rarely do.

When you are raising children, you spend so much time trying to get through the day that it is almost impossible to understand what the days are adding up to.

And then one September, nobody needs a backpack.

Nobody tells you that the walking never stops. Nobody tells you that thirty years in, your heart is still out there, still moving around in a body you no longer control, and you are still standing in the doorway watching it go.

Here is the truth nobody puts on a nursery card. Half of parenting is wondering if you are doing it right. The other half is replaying every moment you were sure you weren’t.

There is no third option. There is no calm middle where you simply know. I have never met a parent who lived there, and I do not believe the address exists.

What you want, in the thick of it, is embarrassingly small. Five more minutes of sleep. A shower with the door locked. A sentence you get to finish. A moment where nobody needs anything from your body, your patience, your hands. A moment to remember you are also a person, not only a parent standing in for one.

That want does not make you a bad parent. It makes you an adult.

And here is what I have learned: the thing nobody says out loud at the baby shower: adulthood and immunity are not synonymous. You do not stop failing at eighteen. You do not stop being criticized, overlooked, or left out of the thing everyone else was invited to. You still have your heart broken. You still feel like you don’t measure up. You also still have the good days, the ones where you feel like you are standing on top of the world and you own the whole view.

We are taller. We are heavier. Some of us have more grey than we started with. That is the difference. Underneath it, we are still the same kids trying to figure out a world that keeps changing the rules on us.

Except now there is another layer. Now you are responsible for a whole separate person, one who did not ask to be handed to you, one you are supposed to grow into someone decent. There is no manual for this. There was never a manual. There is one unspoken rule, passed down like a family curse: don’t raise an asshole. Past that, you are on your own, and if you get it wrong, everyone will let you know.

So much guilt comes out of that gap. Guilt for the nights you were too tired to be gentle. Guilt for the birthday you rushed. Guilt for the time you said the thing you can still hear yourself saying. It does not fade with time. It just gets quieter company.

I watch young parents now. Diaper bags spilling out of the back seat. Snapping at each other in the cereal aisle over something that isn’t really about cereal. I want to stop them and say something.

I never do.

If I did, it would not be “it goes fast.” Every stranger in every grocery store has already told them that. I would tell them something smaller.

Take the five minutes.

Stop apologizing for wanting them.

There was a version of me that was the centre of someone’s entire world. My arms were where three small people went when they needed comfort. The place they came after a nightmare, a scraped knee or when the world had simply been unkind.

For a while, I could make almost anything feel better.

When did that face change to one of impatience? When did it start looking like disappointment, like anger, more than it looked like home?

I don’t know the exact day. I only know it happened, more than once, and I was standing right there when it did.

In the moment, you cannot see the damage. Not to them. Not to yourself. And most of the time, you never get to go back and fix it properly. Not with the apology you owed. Not with the softness you meant to have instead.

We teach our children to say sorry, to listen, to make it right. We rarely turn those same words on ourselves. The apology hangs there, above the whole thing, and it never quite lands. We are too busy being right.

There are memories I would trade years for. Not to change them. Just to live inside them a second time, slower. To hold on a beat longer before I let go.

My children are grown now. They are kind. They are capable. They love well, and they are loved back. Somewhere inside all of that mess, I must have done something right, and I am proud of them in a way that has nothing to do with me.

But I wish I had been gentler in the moments gentleness would have cost me nothing. Softer when softness was the harder choice, not the easier one. Firm without the anger riding along for the ride.

Maybe that is what I see now when those first-day-of-school pictures begin appearing every September.

The parents see the year ahead. I see all the years behind it.

I see the backpacks that will eventually be left in a closet. The shoes that will become impossibly small. The lunches you will complain about making until one morning you realize you don’t have to make them anymore.

And I know telling someone to enjoy every minute is useless. You won’t. Nobody does.

Some minutes are exhausting. Some are boring. Some are infuriating. Some you will wish away, and you should not have to feel guilty for that either.

But every once in a while, look up.

Stay for another minute. Let them tell you the story that is taking forever. Take the picture, even if everyone is complaining. Say sorry when you should. Let something go when being right doesn’t matter nearly as much as you think it does.

Because another year will pass. Then another.

And one September, there will be no first day picture to take.

My heart is still out there, walking around in two grown bodies that used to fit against mine.

But there is a phantom weight there, too. The memory of another body pressed against me. A reminder that although two now stand before me, there once were three.

I don’t think a mother ever forgets the weight of her children.

Maybe that is the part nobody tells you.

You spend years carrying them until one day you put them down for the last time without ever knowing it is the last time.

And somehow, you keep carrying them anyway.