I’ve been spending a lot of time in the dark lately. Babies will do that to you. And winter. Winter will do that to you too.
I feel like I live half my life scurrying around in the dark fetching bottles, tiptoeing so as to not wake sleeping babies, and checking social media because what the heck, I’m already awake so I guess I might as well.
I usually wake up for the day long before the sun–coffee in one hand, formula in the other. The days of sleeping in are gone.
Until yesterday. By some miracle, the baby gave me an extra hour. I woke up with a start, thinking surely I had missed the hungry cries. But no, a tiny bundle was still snoozing away in the crib. As I rolled back into bed for one more precious hour, I caught a glimpse of the sunrise outside my window.
“It’s so beautiful,” I thought. “I should take a picture.”
But my camera was in the other room and my bed was calling. Fatigue beat beauty and the moment was gone. When I got up a bit later, the room was flooded with light, but the sunrise moment was gone forever.
Isn’t that just like life?
We are so good at doing–doing the trust-based, therapeutic parenting thing, doing the provider thing, doing the chauffeur thing, doing the short-order cook thing. We rush around all day and then drop into bed exhausted.
Fatigue beats beauty–the beauty of newborn baby smells, the beauty of tiny toddlers exploring everything for the first time, the beauty of big kids who still want to hold hands in the parking lot and still want to snuggle on the couch for a movie.
When I say it all goes by too fast, I feel old. But it’s true.
Especially for our kids from hard places, celebrating the beauty, the sunrise moments, is so important. “Imperfect progress,” we call it in our house, but progress is progress. And progress is beautiful.
Of course, not all of our sunrise moments need to be captured on film (or however it is that photos are captured now) or shared with the world on social media. Some of them are for our eyes and our hearts alone.
But don’t miss them today in the rush, rush, rush. Slow down enough to catch one. You might just find that the sunrise moments are nourishing, too.
Maybe just as much as an extra hour of sleep.
