What's new

For several years running, when someone asked what was new with me, I had a big list of important news:
2005 - graduated from college, got engaged, got married
2006 - had a baby, was accepted to/started grad school
2007 - bought a house
2008 - had a baby
2009 - graduated from grad school
2010 - had a baby
Life hasn't slowed down. But my "accomplishments" these days are a bit different and aren't the big life events people celebrate. Some days, I'm doing good if I drop off and pick the girls up on time and manage to do something productive in between. Others I manage to reorganize a whole section of the house or teach one of the girls something useful - tying her shoes, writing her name, a trick to remember something. This is the minutiae of everyday life. I've heard parenthood called painting a cathedral. The work is slow and sometimes tedious. Every so often, I catch a glimpse of the progress and it's beautiful. But most people don't recognize the beauty and importance until it is completed.
And it takes years of incremental progress to paint a cathedral.
There's both pride and a pang of sadness when one of the girls hits a new milestone. I'm so excited and proud when the girls are finally potty trained, begin school, make new friends without my help. But there's a twinge of sadness knowing that each milestone means they are successfully moving away from me. From the time a child is born, a parent's job is to slowly teach that child to live independently of him/her. In college, I was struck by the idea that the most successful parents' kids are ready to leave home at 18. They're not running for their lives or desperate to stay. Instead, they willingly leave and come back to visit and ask for advice when they need it. Things shift. Parents aren't needed for daily guidance, but are appreciated for their wisdom. When the time comes for the girls to move out, I want them to be ready to face the world. I want them to miss me but not be crippled by the distance between us. To me that's one sign of a job well-done.
Not all my less obvious accomplishments involve the girls. I feel like I'm finding a balance between being active and eating well and not letting it preoccupy me. I'm becoming more comfortable with being who am I and not trying to be who I'm not. I'm learning to say no, especially when saying yes comes at the expense of me or my family. I've rediscovered some long-discarded hobbies and with it, a bit more of who I used to be. I've focused more attention on relationships that challenge me to be a better person and less on the ones that let negativity fester.
In short, a lot of good is happening. They're all small pieces of the big, important picture, but much of it doesn't feel noteworthy to most people. Indeed, a lot of it simply feels like life. Perhaps when people ask what's going on with me, I should just smile enigmatically and answer, "Life."