Of Love and Laundry

There is a pile of laundry waiting for me…again.

I pick up your favorite shirt – nope, the red popsicle stain didn’t come out. Better use the stain stick on it.

I set it aside, smiling at the memory of your excited face watching the summer parade with the popsicle dripping down your chin, racing the sun that threatened to melt it before you absorbed all its cherry sweetness.

Yesterday was a good day. Ordinary, sticky, sweaty – but it passed with mostly smiles.

Next come a pair of little pants. They have a hole in the knee from when you fell on our walk. The scrape you got is already scabbing over, thanks to Mommy’s magic bandages and a kiss on your tear-tracked cheek. I carried you the rest of the way, even though my back was already aching – probably from all this laundry.

The pants will mend, so I set them aside to be patched up later.

It was an ordinary walk. Skinned knees happen sometimes, despite my best efforts. Luckily, you patch up easier than your pants. On today’s walk, along our same, ordinary route, you ran again -- fearless.

The average breastfed infant nurses 1098 hours in the first 6 months of life, and that’s a conservative estimate. That means I spent approximately 90 full day’s worth of hours rocking you at my breast, singing how many lullabies? I lost count. I’m embarrassed to say, sometimes it was exhausting, redundant...boring even. Up and down, back and forth, day and night.

Now I marvel that you’ll soon start preschool, that you walk and talk and feed yourself with ever -growing fingers, I think often of those midnight feeds -- the peace and comfort it gave you just to be close to me.

“Mommy! Come play blocks!” The laundry can wait, I suppose. After all, there will always be more…

Well, I was right, wasn’t I? There is always more laundry, day after day, year after year.

Here I stand, trying to scrub grass stains out of your soccer uniform. You made that goal though – even in the rain!

As you stood up, beaming with pride and muddied from your slide, you searched me out in the crowd and pumped a fist in the air. I know how many hours you’ve spent practicing those moves – almost equal to the number of hours you spend describing them to me over and over, chattering on about Messi and Ronaldo, and asking me if I think your jumping height is above average as you leap into the air with gusto. If only I could bottle some of that energy!

Today you helped peel apricots for canning. You took the dogs for a walk on your own – pretty routine.

What else happened today?

Oh, your beloved basketball hoop blew over in that rainstorm and dented a little, but you didn’t cry. Instead, you examined it carefully and pronounced, “It’s not that bad. It’ll just help me improve my aim!” Then you knelt down and spent a while repairing the net by hand and re-attaching it. You didn’t ask me for help with it. Didn’t need to – you know what to do.

Has it already been ten years since that walk when you skinned your knee? How did they happen so fast? You must have skipped a few pages when I wasn’t looking – or maybe while I was folding all this laundry!

Somehow it passed by as mostly ordinary days -- and aren’t we glad that it did? Ordinary meant you were mostly healthy. It meant I was fairly capable, at least. Ordinary meant lots of story time hours and runs through the sprinkler and peanut butter sandwiches and casual but heartfelt, “G’night, I love you’s.”

Tonight as I put dinner leftovers into a container to be used tomorrow, you sidle up to me and, without a word, wrap your arms around me and squeeze. To my surprise, you hold on for a long time -- longer than ordinary. I can’t help noticing how close you are to outgrowing me, but I don’t say it.

You whisper, “Thanks, Mommy!”

“Thanks for what?”

“For everything. Today was a really good day.”

I smile. It really was. Nothing out of the ordinary, but very good. That's how it hits me for the millionth time that I would take the ordinary days over any other, as many as I can get with you before the house is quieter...

and there is a little less laundry...

and I find myself remembering them as the best days of our lives.