the windows in the doors and the little people in my heart

The day had been long and the couch felt beyond comfy. I realized that I hadn't sat down for several hours - if not most of the day. Finally declaring my work "done" was a call I just had to make. It's never really done, I just have to pick a pausing point or rest would always be a foreign concept. I pulled my soft cream colored blanket, with turquoise and purple dots on it, up to my chin and took a deep breath. The dishes were done, most of the laundry clean, and the closet had been organized. That last task had been a huge one. New linoleum had been placed in the closet as well as new shelving. Everything had to come out of the small closet, sorted, and organized. Whew! A quick trip to Target had aided in the final organization as several bins and crates had been purchased and filled. My eyes wandered to the french doors which separate our living room from our front porch/play room. The twenty small windows embedded in those doors looked strange. Clear. Clean. I wasn't used to that look. I had let the finger prints/tongue prints/ crayon marks/many other who-knows-what smudges mar those windows for far, far too long. I had been so pleased when the task of wiping away all of the yuck from those windows had been completed. It took me quite awhile to wash the front and back of each window. Forty panes of glass can be time consuming. - Probably why I put it off for so long. But suddenly, in that moment I felt this uneasy feeling begin to make its way into my mind and body. It was as if I was getting a small peak into the future. I realize that I will always have messes to clean up - but those tiny hand prints? There will come a time when they will not be a factor in my cleaning at all. I smiled as I remembered my mom's email shortly after we left their house at Christmas time. It read, "I cant decide whether I want to clean the little hand prints off from my sliding glass doors or not yet... Precious memories." At the time I read that I thought she was pretty crazy. I get frustrated at those smudges. Just smudges. Making my home look unkempt and messy. But then that email began to make sense to me. Alot of sense. Those smudges do indeed hold precious memories. Memories of little pudgy hands that are learning what they can do each day. Little hands that reach up to take mine. And they won't always do that. Some day there will not be a stumble in their step, but a confidence. And they won't need me as much. How I got from gleaming french doors to not being needed is simply a talent of my overactive mind. - You're welcome. As I sat there staring at those beautiful doors I realized that as tired as I get these days, as frustrating as it can be for me to be pulled in so many directions, as overwhelming as it can be to have four dependent little ones, - the fear of not being needed some day trumps all of it. And I am not going to wrap this post up in any kind of pretties. This is it. Feel the irony. I am afraid of the day that these little people reach the very independence that I myself am striving and preparing them for. It's this strange insecure fear. Like a "what will I be when I am no longer doing everything that is so permeating my life right now?" kind of fear. Incongruent, no?