I Missed This!

The kids were giving me a hard time about the pictures in our living room.  Specifically, our family pictures.  We have a larger picture of the whole family, surrounded by smaller individual pictures.  What?  They are the faces of the people I love most in the world!  I see no problem with them.  But Mom, they protested, the pictures are more than 5 years old.

They are?  I looked at them again, harder this time.  Yes, the twins were adorably chubby in their toddlerhood.  There were cute little boy faces of David and Eddie grinning at me.  Those two boys have lost their round cheeks and are in high school now.  The pictures were taken in our backyard - two houses ago.  It was a different time for our family, when they all lived at home and things seemed to move a trifle slower.

Maybe I'm a little bit nostalgic for that time when I made dinner for ten people every night.  I liked having them all home, with me.  It's easy to forget the hard parts and just remember the happy smiles that hang on my living room wall.  I know I should get some new, more current pictures.  I just don't want to forget these ones.

I realized that I remember the happy parts of those times because I wrote about them.  I don't have to write about all the parts, but whatever I do write is what I remember.  And not writing for the past few years has meant that I'm not remembering.  Big swaths of our lives have happened, ended, and are now being forgotten.  That makes me sad.  Especially now that they are growing up and leaving home at a frighteningly fast speed, I want to hang on to the happy things a little bit tighter.  I need to fill my mother-heart with all the good of today, and be able to remember it tomorrow.

And so I'll start writing again.  My family is worth it.  Our memories are worth it.  All the good we can add to the world by just pointing it out is worth it.