The Breathtaking Moments of Motherhood

They’ve always caught me off guard. Those moments as a Mom where I’m stopped dead in my tracks completely blindsided by this crazy ride called motherhood. It’s never really been the expected that’s done it for me. Don’t get me wrong. I love the photo-worthy moments like first steps or day one of Kindergarten where my camera is ready to capture what I know is coming. The breathtaking moments I’m referring to, however, are the ones where cameras are nowhere to be found because they are so unexpected.

The very first one I remember happened the day my daughter visited us at the hospital after the birth of her brother. As I held my newborn in my arms, my toddler came waddling in the room, and it was as if the moment froze in time. Suddenly, we were a family of four. Of course, those moments are fleeting because life takes over, or in this case, toddler-hate took over, as having a new brother was clearly not in her plans.

There’ve been more of these breathtaking moments since then that I can count. My daughter, walking into elementary school, not for the first time, but for the last. The day my son looked out of an airplane window leading up to our first mission trip and calmed my overactive nerves with a few simple words way beyond his years. Sometimes, it’s as simple as a smile that I know is unique to that singular moment, and I wish I could preserve it because the next time, that smile will be different. Changed by circumstances or just time, refusing to stop.

These moments seem to come faster and stronger as my kids get older. Maybe it’s nostalgia or maybe it’s just that the space between camera-ready milestones become longer. Recently, I experienced one so deep and profound that it took me longer to recover than normal.

I was lying in bed scrolling through my Instagram account when I saw a picture pass by my feed. At first, I didn’t even notice it was her, but there she was. My daughter, now allowed to dip her toes in social media, was nestled between two friends heading to Sunday night youth group.

It seemed simple really– just a picture. Except it wasn’t just a picture. It was everything I wasn’t prepared for and at the same time, everything I wanted for my child staring me in the face. There was maturity and friendship, which is a beautiful thing to have as a young girl navigating the teen years. She was still the same daughter who wanders around our house rolling her eyes at her brother or throwing clothes all over her room in search of the perfect outfit. And yet, she was different. Suddenly, she was a young girl out with friends while I saw pieces of her life on an Instagram newsfeed. That’s when it hit me. Hard. The bulk of her life experiences up to this point have involved me, but now she’s suddenly of that age where I won’t always be there for the moments.

She’ll laugh and cry with her friends, and I won’t know it happened. Afterward, she’ll come home, and I’ll ask about her day. Not understanding that I crave all the details, she’ll leave some out–partly, because she’s a teenager, and that’s what they do, but mostly because to her, they are inconsequential. She won’t understand that to me, they are everything.

So, there I sat staring at a simple black and white photo of three girls. Breathless. Forced to admit that I’m not ready. That I’m jealous of the friends who will come and go and get to experience things with her that I might only see in selfies if I’m lucky. That those moments will become so influential in her life that they might overshadow our moments. It’s this kind of stuff that reminds me that parenting is not for the faint of heart. It’s beautiful and messy. It’s the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. It leaves you lying on a bed staring at a picture on Instagram for longer than should be normal wanting to stop everything and yet knowing that you can’t. Instead, you just lay there praying that the next breathtaking moment of motherhood comes a little bit easier to swallow.