Be Present

Yesterday, while I was outside pushing my son in his swing, my mind kept drifting. I kept thinking about all of the things that I needed to get done. I needed to go to the grocery store. I needed to fold laundry. I needed to unload the dishwasher. And who knows how long I was distracted by all of those thoughts before I was brought back to the present. 

And as my attention was brought back, I realized something: I was stealing my own joy. I was so preoccupied with whatever chores I needed to get done that I wasn't allowing myself to enjoy playing with my son. And that hurt my heart so much. 

Once my husband and I decided that we were ready to start trying for a baby, it was all that I could think about. All I wanted was to be pregnant. The thoughts were especially prevalent because I watched kids for a living. I couldn't wait until I was raising my own kids. So every month that passed when I wasn't pregnant brought me a lot of sorrow. I couldn't understand how I could want something so bad and it could elude me so easily. I wanted to be a mother more than anything in the world. 

And yet, yesterday, there I was, pushing my son in the swing and it was like I wasn't even there. These types of moments, where my son's laughter filled the air, were the moments that I was looking the most forward to when I dreamed of pregnancy. Yet my mind was elsewhere.

I'm currently living my dream. My husband and I just bought a house. I'm a published author. I'm able to send my son to a good school. I have a strong relationship with my family. I have everything that I wanted, especially my most important dream. I'm a mother but I have a tendency to not let myself enjoy it to the fullest. My joy and attention were being taken away from me with thoughts of life's most mundane moments. 

So as I snapped my attention back to the present moment, I told myself that I needed to stop and smell the roses. I needed to enjoy these moments to the fullest possible extent. These moments with my son mean more to me and will continue to mean more to me than anything else ever will. More than a clean house. More than folded laundry. More than anyone or anything. 

I realized that when my son is grown and I'm an empty nester, I won't ever reminisce about how much laundry I folded or how many dishes I washed when he was growing up. And neither will he. He'll remember riding his scooter on our back patio and swimming with his Paw Patrol pool toys. And I want him to remember me being there with him, soaking up every precious second that I had with him. And I want to remember these moments vividly, not through a haze because my mind wandered to my to-do list. 

People say all the time "don't blink because you'll wake up one day and your baby boy will be a man". I can honestly tell you that nothing would make me sadder than if I fell victim to this cliche and I missed my son growing up. I have what I wanted so desperately that I could barely stand it: a happy, healthy child. And yet I was wasting precious time with him over something as trivial as laundry. 

It's so easy to get caught up in what you think you "should" be doing. But I understand now that I'll always have laundry to do and dishes to wash. It's a fact of life. But what I won't always have is time, especially with my son being so little. He's only little for a little while. And I don't want to miss out on what I so desperately craved because life got in the way. Or rather, I let life get in the way. 

It's my choice how I spend my time and how I think. And I choose to be present. I choose to enjoy living the dream that at one point felt impossible. I choose to be a present mother rather than strive to be a "perfect" one. 

-Chelsea