The In-Between

A few days ago my fifteen-year old brother spoke to me about his high school experiences. During the conversation, he sighed loudly, flung his arms across his lap and said words that (probably shouldn’t have) made me laugh.

               
            “I just can’t wait for high school to be over with so I can have things figured out.”

It was the “figured out” that really got me; here I am at twenty-three, a wife and mother to 10 month old twin girls, and of course I don’t have things figured out, or even together at all. But I remember thinking the same way once; high school is this strange stage where you feel like an adult, yet don’t have the responsibilities of one. You worry about relationships, assignments, money, career success, and the wrath of your parents. You can’t wait to graduate and blend seamlessly into this happy adult world where you are the captain of your own ship and therefore able to steer it clearly through any storms.

                

             But for me, like most, the stress didn’t end when high school did; rather, it became more intense and at times I found myself longing for the freedom being a teenager afforded. And so I worked, and went to university, and waited, waited in the in-between for the day I would wake up and feel like an adult and really have my shit together. Then, after a difficult break up of a long-term relationship, I found my soulmate in the chaos. Shawn made me feel like my life had real meaning again, and soon we knew we wanted to spend the rest of our lives together. But we had to wait, until it was financially feasible.

                

             So, we waited, hovering in between being a couple who wanted to be engaged and a couple who was. But one day Shawn had a horrible accident at work, falling fifteen feet out of a scissor lift. What followed was days in the hospital, surgery, and then six long months of recovery. And I found that again, I was waiting, waiting for the day that felt like a fantasy, where Shawn would be able to walk normally and dig his way out of the crippling depression his injury induced.

                

             However, we did become engaged; one good thing that came from his accident was that Shawn and I realized, all money aside, we didn’t want to wait any longer to move ahead with marriage. But that was difficult too; I had waited so long for the day we became engaged, and yet once it happened I couldn’t wait for the wedding planning stage to be over with and the marriage to begin. Planning a big party was neither of our forté, and as we were still coping with his injury we talked very seriously many times about skipping the entire ceremony and simply going down to city hall to make it official.

When we found out we were expecting identical twin girls a few weeks before our wedding, and later that we would have to be hospitalized due to an incompetent cervix and the risk for premature birth, well that was waiting too. Once admitted to the hospital, I made a calendar of the months and crossed off each horribly slow day as it passed. And when our daughters were born at exactly 27 weeks gestation, and we endured 2.5 months in the NICU, I thought time might actually be going backwards. I couldn’t enjoy being at home with any empty nursery, and I couldn’t enjoy being at the hospital where my girls were tubed up in incubators.  I just wanted it to be over, and I was sure that if I could just survive the NICU everything would fall into place.

But when the twins finally did come home, the moment I’d waited so long for (and sometimes doubted would ever come) wasn’t at all what I thought it would be; I had spent so much time counting the days until they were released, that I hadn’t actually thought about what it would be like when they were. They cried excessively, had horrible acid reflux, and wouldn’t sleep for more than an hour at a time. There were some long nights where I actually wondered if the NICU would take them back.

Now, my girls are nearly 10 months old (7 corrected), and I find myself missing those newborn days. Not the tears, but the times where they would fall asleep on my chest, or their surprise smiles, or the first peals of the rolling belly laughter I hear so often now. As awful as those days felt when I was living them, I am genuinely sad that my girls have grown out of them.

So what I’ve learned is this; I’ve spent too much time in the in-between, waiting for one stage to end so another can begin. I haven’t spent enough time relishing the curveballs; it seems like an odd thing to say, but you can only grow from diversity if you actually allow yourself to experience it. At particularly difficult or painful times I found I had to stop myself from just closing my eyes and sprinting blindly through to the finish line. Sometimes “soldiering on” meant not only ignoring the bad, but also the good, and I regret those missed opportunities.

But now I know. I have learned from my mistakes. And when I have those moments, where my daughters are yelling in frustration as they rock back and forth on their knees in an attempt to crawl, and I feel like my head might pop off, I have to stop. I take a deep breath. I open a window. I sip my coffee. And I get down on the floor and shower my girls in kisses and encouragement. I remind myself that this moment on the floor with my twins will one day be gone and never, ever come again. It hits me now, as it wouldn’t have before, that time goes by far too quickly, whether you want it to or not, and I have to find the hidden blessings. No more in between, no more waiting for something to be over and something “better” to begin. I am finally making the most out of every single moment I am given in this life, despite how easy or difficult that particular one might be.  The truth is there will always be thorns, but I can’t let that stop me from smelling the roses.