That time my three year old begged me to choose her

“Mom are you going to put me to bed tonight?”

Every night I am home I get this same question, right around bath time, and after we have eaten. I can never understand it. She has been with me all day. With the exception of preschool, our days together go pretty uninterrupted. So why every night does my little girl, going on four, want to know if I am going to put her to bed? My husband is by far the more fun parent, often making up stories and taking extra time for cuddles. His time is precious and limited, and she should want him. She has such a sweet bond to him so I couldn’t figure out why the bed time question every night. We alternate nights so that my son and daughter both get equal tucking-in love, and on the nights it is my turn to put her to bed she cheers in delight. It has puzzled me.

Then this weekend, as I spent my ample airport time reading a book called Hands Free Mama I realized why. For all the “time” we spend together this is one of the only times my phone is placed far away. Bedtime is our time. We talk, read, and I scratch her back and sing the same Christy Knockels song that I have sung to her since birth. It’s called “For Your Splendor,” but she has renamed it”the deep end song,” and she begs me to sing the same chorus (to go ahead and answer the question, no I don’t sound like either of my brothers). Recently my husband tried to sing it to her, and she turned to him with an indignant voice and said “you don’t even know that song.” It was special. This is the time of the day I put away everything else for her, and I tell her not-so-subtly that for a half-hour I am choosing her.

It saddens me to my core when I realize that the reason my daughter has been begging for my attention at bedtime is because I have been spending my days wrapped up in things that matter far less. I have always been a person who likes to accomplish things, and the hardest part of staying home is my accomplishments cannot be measured when it comes to my children. I can do everything right, and they can still hit another child on the playground, pick a fight with their sibling, or speak disrespectfully to an adult. Motherhood cannot be measured, BUT you know what can? Emails, laundry, dishes, full calendars, cleanliness, trash emptying, words on pages, speaking engagements booked, and so when my husband arrives home from an engineering job I barely understand, I can feel like less of a bum because I did the laundry (it’s a rather complicated process). However I have been missing the real reason I wanted to stay home in the first place. I have been putting my kids’ hearts on hold in an attempt to feel better about my insecurities of accomplishing.

My daughter’s bedtime pleas have been nothing less than smoke signals to let me know that she needs me. Suddenly moments I have missed come flooding back to me: my son toddling up to me and saying “mama up,” my daughter asking me to color with her, my son begging me to do bubbles, the 1000 times I barked that we were going to be late, the messes I wouldn’t let happen, and for what? For a cleaner house, a more booked schedule, and less contentment?

I was crying to my husband the other night (hormones) that I have been feeling so discontent, so restless, so useless, and so inadequate in my current role. I have actually wrestled with the idea of getting a job because it feels like I am currently failing at the one that is most important to me – my family. I have blamed everything from hormones to summer to staying home without looking at the reality, that I am fully to blame. I have been choosing lesser things. I have been choosing distractions over my children. I have been holding my phone to my face, and begging it to give me significance.

We are in this short season of summer that will end in a time when I can’t come play because I have to nurse or hold a crying baby. This will be the last season before we add another, and I have decided to fully engage with my kids instead of biding my time until it gets easier (which I’ve heard is as mythical as a unicorn). It is hard, but it is also good. Almost everything worth having in life comes from hard work.

My impact on my kids’ lives starts today. It starts with saying “yes” to the things that feel less important and “no” to the things that don’t matter nearly as much. In what will feel like blinking I won’t be able to pick my son up anymore, and my daughter won’t want to put on shows where she dances around singing “Let’s Go Fly a Kite.” With each day my role in my kids’ lives slowly lessens, like sand slipping away one grain at a time, and if I’m not careful I will have missed all the days where they wanted me the most, and I was available the least. If I’m not careful I will be desperate for them to communicate with me only for them to say it’s too late. As our pastor Andy Stanley has said before when it comes to life, “the important rarely feels urgent and the urgent is rarely important.”

My kids are important but they are rarely urgent, except when my son throws himself from furniture… that feels urgent. Coloring pictures, building blocks, running in the sprinkler, playing pretend, and pushing my kids on the swing are not urgent tasks, but they are vastly important in my child’s world. Don’t get me wrong – I will still relish in those nap time hours and breathe a sigh of relief when they are both asleep. However I will choose them, when it’s inconvenient, when the laundry has piled up, when the bathrooms are dirty, and the dishes are stacked. I will choose them and tell them clearly that they are more important than social media, emails, and my free time. I will say “yes” instead of “no,” knowing that one day they will stop asking, and I will mourn it. Knowing one day this will all be over, and I will have to ask myself, did I really do the best I could in the years that were most vital?

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