Editor's Corner

Yesterday two different people forwarded me an essay by Anna Quindlen wherein she is looking at her young adult children, and wondering where their childhood went. It’s a great tear- worthy piece and has choked me up more than once. Her basic premise is that as mothers to young children, we owe it to ourselves to spend more time enjoying each day with them.

I’m all for this. Huzzah! I’m all for spending more time playing and cuddling and less time making dinner, cleaning, and doing laundry, and all the boring stuff. The problem is that we can’t really make the days longer (unless we forego sleep entirely), and we can’t make time go slower.

I have certainly had my fantasies about “freezing” my baby at different lovable stages. Oh, I’d say, “I’d give anything if she never outgrew the infant stage!” Of course, there’s a reason we can’t do this - how odd life would be, perpetually on a three-hour cycle with a child who never did anything new. No thanks – I’ll take my delightful and adorable four (and a half!) year old any day, and as much as I would love to freeze her, I have a feeling she’ll be equally charming at age 8, and 12, as a young adult and so on.

I just wish someone would invent a way to make the kids stop growing up so fast! We see all these medical breakthroughs that serve to make our lives longer – fabulous. Now can we spend some time making childhood longer, please??

So where does that leave us? Is regret simply inevitable, no matter what we do? Maybe not. Maybe some of these kiddos we see learning so many exciting things every day will teach us a trick or two. Who knows, maybe they’ll discover a cure for regret by the time I’m old.

—Jessica Davis