It's About Time.

Hello Love and Laundry Readers!

Some people pause to note the passage of time on New Year's Day. This makes sense, from a calendar perspective. But I always mark the passage of time at the end of the school year, which leads to the lazy pause of summer before something new begins again.

In June, my youngest child will graduate from 8th grade, ending our time at the school where her oldest sibling started out in pre-k, fifteen years ago.

Fifteen years is a long time. I was relatively young when we started at this school. Now I'm...not. I had a stroller, diapers, and an infant in a car seat when we dropped my oldest son off for his first day of pre-k 15 years ago.

Now that little boy is going to India this summer to study abroad. I can remind him, gently, once or maybe even twice, to take his malaria medication and get his yellow fever shots, but I am no longer in charge of making sure these things actually happen. And that's hard.

Being the mother of teenagers and young adults is sort of like being Cassandra from the old Greek myth. You have the gift of prophecy. You can see what will happen next. But you're condemned to have your prophecies ignored by those around you.

So that's what happens when we trade the stroller for a driver's license and the pacifier for a passport. It's both liberating and terrifying. Time rushes onward, and now we're in a whole new phase.

I think the strangest thing about the passage of time is the fact that we cannot feel it passing. It's not like driving in a car with the windows open, the days and months and years whooshing past, blowing your hair.

Instead the passage of time is static, made invisible through repetition, especially when you're raising children. Days, months, even decades, of chicken nuggets and homework, laundry and dishwasher loading, walking to the bus stop or driving to and from elementary and middle school. Day in, day out, for years. Fifteen years in my case.

And suddenly, it's over.

So that's what I'm thinking about during this month of Mother's Day, which I got to celebrate at my favorite gluten free restaurant with all three of my kids and my husband and my own mother, who came to town to see my daughter perform as Ariel in her middle school production of The Little Mermaid.

I got to meet up with some writer friends and some wonderful readers at the Gaithersburg Book Festival.

And now I am locking myself in my office to put the finishing touches on my next book, which is due to my acquiring editor on June 1.

Until then, I'm hoping any milestones you experience this spring are more sweet than bittersweet. And I hope you had a wonderful Mother's Day.

I leave you today with a picture of a botanical miracle. I love to garden, but I have more enthusiasm than skill. Below is a picture of the arbor in my backyard and the roses that did not bloom last year but are finally blooming now.

I know they won't last long, but I'm grateful nonetheless for this temporary explosion of beauty. Maybe that's the secret to a happy life, somehow managing to enjoy the blooming roses, all the while knowing they will eventually fade and fall, giving way to the next season.

All my love,

Christine

Shakespeare said it best: "Merrily, merrily shall I live now, under the blossom that hangs on the bough."

Catching up with my lovely friend and Lake Union sister, Rosa Kwon Easton at the Gaithersburg Book Festival.