"I'm home."

Every mom goes through it.  Your toddler is tired and cranky and in dire need of sleep.  So you put her to bed, tell her to stay put, and pray that maybe this time she won’t get out of bed!  And then, when you go to check on her… Her clothes have been pulled out of drawers, she’s traded her ‘night-time panties’ (pull-ups) for ‘big-girl princess panties’, ALL the diaper wipes have been pulled out of the container and…is that dye in her hair??? 

Okay, so maybe you’ve been through it minus the dye (that was pretty much my own fault.  Never, EVER, store Easter-egg dye in your toddler’s room, no matter how ‘out of reach’ you think it may be).  The point is that all parents know how frustrating those elusive nap-times or bed-times can be.

My daughter is currently two.  And – if you can’t tell from the prior two paragraphs – lately I have been struggling with getting her to stay in bed and go to sleep.  It has seemed that no matter what I do, she refuses to stay in her bed.  I’ve been about ready to pull my hair out, and I’ve started dreading nap and bed times more than she does!

Then today I read this article.

For those who don’t want to read the whole thing, it basically talks about how our toddlers just want to be with us, and that perhaps their seemingly ‘bad behavior’ when it’s time to rest is really just a cry for us to spend that extra five minutes of time with them.  Well, this article really touched me.

It’s an amazing article, and a great read, but that’s not exactly what touched me.  What got to me was that, while reading it, I remembered the last time I came into my daughter’s room to see that she had pulled out the entire contents of yet another box of diaper wipes.  She was wearing nothing but a fluffy pink tutu (not what she had gone to bed in) and was staring up at me from the midst of the diaper-wipe-mess, and she said ever-so-softly, as though it would completely eradicate my anger, “Mommy, I’m home.”

My response had been less-than-loving.  “Of course you’re home,” I had said as I hastily changed her back into her pajamas and made her clean up her mess.  “Now go to bed.”

Thinking back to that moment, only two nights ago, I can’t help but cringe.  You see, like so many parents in today’s world, I share custody of my daughter.  Every few months for the rest of her childhood she will spend anywhere from a few weeks to a few months with her father.  

So when she looked up at me with those deep blue eyes, maybe she wasn’t trying to get out of trouble.  Maybe, on some level, she was reminding me… “Mommy, I’m home.  I’m here, with you, now.  I won’t be next month.  I won’t be for my third birthday.  But right now, even though you’re upset, I’m home.”

Even for those of us who don’t have to share custody, we can learn from this… Our babies are home, but they won’t always be.  Maybe yours won’t leave until he or she is 18, but one day in the too-soon future, they won’t want us to read to them or sing to them or cuddle them as they fall asleep.  And that’s when we’ll wish we had.

Today I sang my beautiful girl to sleep, stroking her hair as she fought with all her might to keep her heavy eyelids open.  I held her once she had drifted off to dream land, and I couldn’t help but get a little teary-eyed as I watched her peaceful face.  These are the moments that I will remember, long after she is grown and gone with babies of her own, not the messes or the anger.  These are the moments I want to hang on to, while my baby is “home”.

I am so glad that I came to this realization now, rather than once it was too late.