Simplistic Play and the Older Mom

Today Christopher and I had a great bonding moment. We engaged in simplistic play. We were sitting on the kitchen floor and he was attempting to roll a ball to me. He managed to move it the three inches over to me probably 15% of the time, but that didn't matter. We weren't playing to win or to improve skills. We were simply having fun! I wish I could attach a video clip here to let you hear his contagious laughter at the hilarity of a ball rolling across the floor! We were having the time of our lives, let me tell you!

Sometimes I can really feel the age factor (still 40 here for a few more days!) when I'm physically involved with the kids, and it can be draining at times. But in a way, I sometimes think that I've been blessed to be an older mom. Here's why I say that: I was able to earn a university degree, have a career, travel around the world, move out on my own (all the way from Ohio to Arizona), change careers, and do so many little things as a single person while most of my friends were marrying and starting their families. Now sure, if God would have allowed me to follow that typical pattern, I would have teenagers now myself and still would have been happy, but instead He allowed me to experience things in my life that I may not have otherwise. Now that I'm a wife and a mother, I have no real desire to pursue all those things because I've already experienced them. I am not feeling as if life is passing me by and I'm not getting to really "live" because I AM really living! I am totally devoted to caring for my family and nothing out there is calling me to come away from that devotion because I've already done them and this is where I have always wanted to be.

I feel that I am able to really enjoy my boys' childhoods because nothing else matters that much. I can drop everything and sit on the kitchen floor on a Sunday afternoon and roll a ball to a one-year-old for fifteen minutes and not bat an eye. I can walk away from the baskets of clothes that need to be folded and play a game of Chutes and Ladders (Snakes and Ladders here in Canada) with my four-year-old. I can go out on the deck on a sunny day and pretend that I'm the librarian checking out library books for my three-year-old at his library. I can sacrifice the desire to have perfect cutout cookies if it means that my boys are standing on their little stools next to me at the kitchen counter having the time of their lives "helping" me cut out cookies. I can put them all in the bathtub together and then sit on the stool in the bathroom and just watch them play for a half an hour and not feel the pressing need to hurry them through this activity so that I can move on to the mound of dishes downstairs in the kitchen. (Who wants to rush to wash dishes anyway?!)

Now, granted, I do have those moments like any other mother when I feel that I have more important things to do, but I've waited so long to experience these moments with my kids that I don't want to excuse them away! I want to savor these moments! Lately Stephen and Timothy have been asking me to stay and snuggle with them in bed at night before I go back downstairs. At first I did rush that activity because that was the time that I used to catch up from all my other dropped activities during the day. Then I realized that these moments were becoming very precious to all of us. I can find out a lot about what is going on in their minds as we lay there in the dark and tell stories and ask and answer questions. Sometimes I even find it hard to tear myself away so that they can get to sleep! My 40-year-old body sometimes starts to manifest itself as I find myself drifting off while the two of them are still jabbering away. It's not always good to lie down on the bed with them while we chat!

I love being an older mom, but I do wonder sometimes what it would physically feel like if I were fifteen or twenty years younger like some of my other mom-friends. It sure would be easier to get up off of the kitchen floor after playing ball without feeling like my hips have fallen out of their sockets. It would be easier to lean over a bathtub to wash three little boys' heads while they are resisting the hair-washing. It would be easier to contort myself while I'm trying to help buckle or unbuckle three kids in carseats. It would be easier on the knees when crawling through blanket tunnels or looking under the couch for a lost game piece. It would be easier to carry dead weight four-year-old boys who are fast asleep all the way up to their beds. Physically, I would love to be twenty years younger doing all these things, but I sure am thankful for the way God worked things out in my life. I absolutely love the fact that I am an older mom who can completely and without guilt enjoy simplistic play with my boys!