You Don’t Know They’ve Grown Up Till They’re Too Heavy
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by Marsha Maung
Sept 13th, 2008
I have a very special way of waking up my boys and that is to not wake them up. Instead, to do away with the waking up part, I let the streaming jets of water from the shower do the trick.
No, no, no. What kind of mother do you think I am? I do not dump them in the shower to wake them up.
Well, yeah….yeah, I do. *giggling*
Anyway, it works wonders for me because all I have to do is to carry them to the bathroom, stand them up, remind them to empty their bladders and then give them encouraging nods towards the general direction of the shower. They’re too sleepy to resist at that time, you see, so usually, by the time they’re awake enough to realize that they’re in the shower and grumpy enough to feel manhandled, it’s too late.
As with all mothers, I don’t see my boys growing up. There isn’t a single moment in a day with them that I don’t remind myself that my elder son is two years shy of being an official ‘teen’. There isn’t a day that goes by without me exchanging on-the-lips kisses with my younger son (my elder son have reached a stage whereby he thinks kissing on the lips is yucky). There isn’t a day that goes by without me calling them ‘my babies’.
But they’ve grown up so quickly that all the complaining that I’ve done in the past seems so irrelevant and childish. I am sure all mothers out there can attest to this – we don’t really see it coming, we’re pretty sure it is and try not to think about what’s going to happen when it hits us.
Our kids have grown.
One fine day, I can’t remember which day, I found myself struggling to carry my younger son to the shower (yes, he’s the bulkier one). He clung to me with all his might as I tried to lift him out of the bed. ‘He’s not resisting’, I thought to myself, ‘Then why on earth does it feel like I’m trying to lift a truck? Is it me?’
It wasn’t me, of course, although I have an aching back to blame. It was him who piled on pounds at night when he sleeps. It’s his body that is stretching horizontally and vertically even as I am writing this.
That is why I am here to remind all mothers (and fathers, of course) out there to be conscious of our kids and how they’re growing. You don’t realize that they’ve grown till they can’t fit into their swimming trunks anymore. It’s when they suddenly pop a statement like, ‘Mom, that’s childish. We don’t do that anymore’ that you go like ‘wwhhaaa-?’ For me, it’s one fine morning when I was trying to use the waking-up trick on my kids that I realize that they’ve grown up faster than I’ve anticipated them to.
So, be aware of your kids. Be with them while they still need you because as much as I would like to think of them as my babies, time will take them away from me.
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