Life Lessons From The World Of Toddler

What a two year old knows:  When I fall behind you'll wait for me, and when I am ahead I will reach back and help you.
When I was waiting to become a mother I told myself and, much to my chagrin, most people who would listen that I would not be one of Those Moms who sat their child in front of the television for parts of the day.  God, how I sometimes hate my pre-mother-self and her pre-conceived notions of what motherhood would actually be like.  Once Harry came home and started to adjust I realized two things: 1. I like to take a shower and get dressed every day and 2. television, when monitored by involved parents, is not necessarily the work of the devil.  So I ate some crow and put Harry in front of the TV in order to take a shower, and I made sure that the shows he was watching were not morally degrading.  One of his favorites became The Backyardigans who, with their catchy tunes and imaginative pretend play captured on our DVR, were delivered to my son in 1/2 hour bites that were the perfect amount of time for me to shower and get dressed.  Life was good.
One of The Backyardigans episodes is called Racing Day, and it is easily Harry's favorite.  (Brendan and I have favorites, too, but those have more to do with the songs than the content...some are very funny if you listen to the actual lyrics).  The abridged version of the racing episode is that the neighborhood pals are having a pretend race around the world and along the way, as each of them tries to WIN, they all discover that the journey of getting there and helping each other along the way are far more important than actually finishing first.  And the chosen winner at the end?  The resourceful Austin, the novice racer who helped each of the other contestants despite setting himself back.  It's the feel-good stuff that good children's programming is made of. 
Many nights a week we race around our house, something Harry started after he watched that episode.  On your mark, get set! he yells, and then waits for you to shout Go! before he races around the living room, kitchen, and dining room.  Harry turns his head to look and see if we're keeping up, and shouts an encouraging C'mon, Mom! if I've fallen behind.  There is no official end to our races, only an abrupt halt of toddler feet, which we must be careful to watch for lest we bowl him over.  He stops, crouches again, and yells On your mark, get set! waits for the Go! and we're off and running again.  Because there is no official end to the game, there is no winner.  We race for the joy of feeling our feet hit the floor, for the fun of sharing a laugh with each other, for the feeling of our breath rushing in and out of our lungs, and for the exhilaration of making our bodies move.  It is about the race, not about the finish line.

And sometimes I sit back and watch Brendan racing with Harry, as Emma squeals from her spot on the sidelines, and I wonder at how much our son knows.  At the ripe old age of two he seems to instinctively understand that winning isn't everything, that cheering others on is just as important as finishing yourself.  He gets one of the key lessons of life that somewhere along the way many of us lose, or never figure out in the first place:  When I fall behind you'll wait for me, and when I am ahead I will reach back and help you.
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Trying to have a baby, when it isn't working, is really, really, really emotionally hard.  Going to baby showers stinks.  Visiting newly arrived babies is like pulling your bones out of your body without anesthesia, leaving you a noodle on the floor, structureless.  It hurts in a way that makes your soul practically bleed, and having others around you winning the race while you cannot even seem to keep pace is truly just awful.  But here's the thing I now know: celebrating the joys of others is just as important as having that joy yourself.  I remember longing for a baby, my arms actually aching to hold my own, at the point when many of our friends and co-workers were giving birth left and right.  There were baby showers on my calendar all year long, and I went to them all.  I hated going.  I did not have fun.  I wanted nothing to do with cutesy games and mocktails; I told myself I was only in it for the cake at the end, and most times that was true.  I always said the appropriate things, wished the parents-to-be well, and left with a rush of relief that I survived another one. 
At the second-to-last baby shower I attended before Harrison came home (for his now best friend, Isaac) I had the double displeasure of being at a baby shower and having to sit next to another guest who was ripe with baby, so late in her pregnancy that her water could have broken at any minute.  Torture does not come close to describing how bad that was for me.  I was keeping quiet, but that pregnant woman kept on talking to me, and then had the audacity to ask me if I had any children.  We can't have kids I told her in a voice that I no longer recognized as my own.  Why?  she asked.  Cringing inside, my gut in a knot, I started my prepared dialogue of the short version of our infertility woes, but she stopped me midsentence and said If you want to be a mother you will be and she squeezed my arm.  How I managed not to cry at that moment is beyond me, because I thought she meant that all I needed to do was try harder, do better, etc.  But what she was really doing was cheering me on, trying to give me the strength to get through the day, the strength she knew I was lacking in that moment.  She asked if we had considered adoption, fostering, etc.  She asked politely, kindly, and in a way that made those options, so often deemed second-best by others, sound like awesome ways to build a family (which they are).  We ended up having a great conversation, I never did cry, and whenever I find myself thinking about how awful it was to go through the testing, the sadness and the heartache of that time, I remember her words.  If you want to be a mother you will be.  There was no mention of getting pregnant in that sentence, only a clear statement about a goal...motherhood.  If we wanted parenthood we could have it, we might just have to find a different way of getting there.
 The truth is we had just started talking about adoption.  We were in the process of getting information from agencies, looking at different programs, trying to decide which options fit best for us.  I was beginning to be able to see a faint light at the end of the tunnel of our agony, and cheering on other mothers by attending their showers was very hard, but not as awful as it had once been.  If I had not gone to Isaac's baby shower, I would never have talked to Jen.  I would not have her words floating around in my head to remind me of her offer of strength, of community, of help on a very difficult day.  I would not have had a personal connection when Isaac's mom told me about their friends, Jen and Jonathan, whose baby boy had a rare form of cancer.  I might not have ached as much for Jen while holding my very own son in my arms; we might not have gone to a benefit to raise money to help pay for her son's escalating medical bills, where we saw community at its very best.  I might not have felt a weight lifted from my own heart when her son arrived at the baptism (of Isaac's little sister), two years later, with a head full of hair, a solid, healthy little body, a clean bill of health, and a huge toothy grin.  Jen was expecting another baby boy (she still is), and as I held my daughter and watched my son play with her son, I knew that it had all worked out okay. 
Sometimes, in adulthood, the life lessons we learned as toddlers come into play:  When I fall behind you'll wait for me, and when I am ahead I will reach back and help you.