Days Go By...

It's the job...I know it's the job that does it, but days pass so fast.  I don't eat lunch. I barely eat breakfast.  I slip from one crisis to the next, from one phone call with one lawyer to another on hold with a crying parent, as I juggle my bag and courage on my way into a violence, threat and risk assessment meeting. The range of emotions in my days begin with anxiety and flip through fear, and frustration, anger and angst, uselessness, incapable, proud and strong, redeemed, justified, and back to scared and confused, and then indignant.  It's not just a roller coaster, it's a Navy Seal training for the emotions, and the days just sneak away, but not at home...

At home the days crawl, like Maggie, and bend from one beautiful sunset to another fun lacrosse practice, and then dusk settles on baths and books, and Harry Potter and Peter Pan, and every time someone says to me, "it goes by so fast," I disagree.  Maybe it's because compared with the frenetic speed of my days my evenings, nights and weekends are, by comparison, tortoise-esque.  The blog helps, and having a wife as wonderful as mine, who feels the same way about all this parenting business, and who invests as much as anyone in the process, perhaps more.  It makes this whole mind numbing experience feel so immediate and never ending.

Our nights don't become our own until well after 9pm, and we don't begrudge the loss of "our time."  It truly is "our time"...all of ours.  We're in this together...the four of us. It makes sense that we work as a team.  It's not Mom and Dad with a Maggie and Zo sideshow, no...it's one push towards something special, not a patchwork collection of moments...we're becoming, constantly, with no intention of actually ending up anywhere except still trying and laughing and working...together.  Zoey can make my night, as I can make hers, and the look on Maggie's face when Mummy walks in the room is rivaled only by the look on Mummy's face too.  It's us vs. everything, and that's how it should be.

The days go by, sure, but not at light speed...at the speed with which we allow them to.  I don't want this to end, so I stretch each day as though it were my last.  Is it all gone too fast? Only if what's behind you was better than what's ahead, and I don't think it is.