A picture popped up in my Facebook memories. One of my all-time favorites, actually. It pops up every year and I think I reshare it every year, even though it’s now well over a decade old.
The setting is a small town where we used to live. We lived on one edge of town and the post office was at the other end, but the town was small enough that even our littlest could make the trek with us.
On this particular spring day, he didn’t have to. His sisters decided that they wanted to give him and our life-sized stuffed emperor penguin Napoleon a ride in our son’s beloved little red wagon.
In the picture, my precious girls, aged 9 and 7 at the time, face away from the camera, one pulling the wagon and one pushing. (The joint effort wasn’t necessary, but that’s where they wanted to be.) Their 4-year-old brother sits in the wagon facing the camera, proudly holding Napoleon and grinning from ear to ear.
The picture is a beautiful representation of those days. My children fought and argued like any siblings, but they also adored each other. And the girls absolutely loved doing things for their brother. The image didn’t capture a rare sweet moment like some pictures do. Instead, it captured that season of our family’s life. Each year it pops back up in my Facebook feed and reminds me of the beauty of that season.
And yes, some days I miss it. It was not always easy. It was not always glorious, and there were days I wanted to move forward or move on or just be in a different place. But it was still good, and I loved my children being that age.
Here’s the thing, though. I love my children now, too. They are grown. That littlest one in the wagon is now the tallest and is joining his sisters in the adventure of adulthood.
All three of my children have hit some really, really hard days, and my heart grieves the pain they’ve had to journey through. But even though I wish I could protect them from the pain, I still cherish what they’ve learned to make them who they are today. And even though I sometimes miss the baby days or the wagon-pulling days or the lap-snuggling days or the read aloud on the couch days, I wouldn’t give up the grown-up days I’m enjoying now just to go back to the old times.
They are all beautiful ages.
Interestingly, there are some other posts that have popped up in my social media feeds that have also shared the glory and beauty of past ages. They are the posts that talk about how wonderful and beautiful childhood was for this generation or that. They accomplish this by declaring the current age to be ugly. They declare that children today will never be good enough or fulfilled enough or healthy enough or happy enough or whatever enough because they live in the wrong age.
Here’s the sad part about this perspective. It would be just like saying that my children are not good enough because they aren’t still 9, 7, and 4. They aren’t still pulling, pushing, and riding a little red wagon through a town they haven’t lived in for years.
This mindset declares that, because of things outside of their control, my children aren’t enough.
As parents, we tend to verbally mourn the loss of the “little” years without celebrating what we’ve gained in the “big” years.
As generations, we talk about how wonderful we had it when we were kids without celebrating the wonderful things that the new generation has that we didn’t.
Yes, I had a freedom to be outside and unrestricted. But I also lost connection with some potentially lifelong friends because I moved and they moved and we lost track of physical mailing addresses. My kids have more restrictions in some ways, but they have friends all around the globe that they interact with every single day.
They will never truly grasp the beauty of my childhood, but I will honestly never experience the beauty of theirs. And it’s okay. Good even. Because there are positives and negatives in every generation. There is beauty in every single age.
Infancy. Childhood. Teen years. Adulthood.
The 50s, the 80s, the 2020s.
Instead of bemoaning what is gone and belittling what is present, what if we were to extol the beauty of it all? What if we were to spend as much time exploring the good as slamming the bad?
We might just find that there’s a whole lot more beauty than we ever imagined possible. Yes, even today.
Not Quite Ordinary 