“When will I be tall enough?” 9-year-old Emma asks me multiple times a week.
She is tired of sitting in a booster seat, and is reminded with each car ride that her height prohibits her from shedding this burdensome relic of childhood.
“Will I be taller than Emma?” 6-year-old Rex asks, as he sizes himself up to her, the top of his head reaching her nose.
He has heard that boys are often taller than girls, and this fact holds him together when he feels too small, too young, too inexperienced in his position as the youngest child to two older sisters.
“Will I be as tall as you?” 13-year-old Lydia asks, standing beautifully at 5’6”, but wondering if she’ll stretch an additional four inches to my soaring height.
She is on the cusp of everything. Nothing is known, and everything feels so close but still so far away. She stretches her fingers out to grasp her future, but her fingertips can’t quite brush up to adulthood, even with her long, adult-like arms.
Since the time I counted their long fingers in the hospital to now, I have wondered these same questions. Did they absorb the overwhelmingly tall genes from my side of the family, the short genes from their dad’s parents, or some combination of genes to keep them somewhere in the middle?
Will my teenage daughters raid my closet to borrow my clothes? Will my teenage son be able to pick me up?
Teenage Lydia and I can share shoes, and that makes me wonder: Does she still have a few more inches of growing to do?
9-year-old Emma seems small in comparison to her sister’s teenage growth spurt, but what will her own growth spurt bring?
It feels so important to know; it’s so hard to wait — especially when booster seat milestones haven’t yet been met.
But I already can’t pick up my teenager, and I miss her little body. It might have been nice if this growth took a bit longer.
So while I wish I could see into the future just to know where everyone is going to end up, I also enjoy these moments of frozen time — these moments when everybody wants to be bigger, but just can’t be yet.
Seasoned parents are so familiar with the urging wish to freeze time, and this is one way it happens — while your children wait anxiously to discover who they will be, you gather up a bit of wisdom to stop and recognize this is a moment of still.
This is a time when they can’t be bigger — at least not at this exact instant. The bigger will come, but right now, they’re not as big as they want to be.
And that is a frozen moment.
