The Importance of Catching Those Fleeting Moments

As a mother with young children you don’t receive a whole lot of feedback that what you are doing — this ever important ‘job’ — is going in the right direction. You go through many stages before your children are old enough to give you that positive reinforcement that reassures those little voices in the back of our minds that unlike everyone else — we have no idea what we’re doing.

The pregnancy stage where everyone comments on how much weight you’ve gained, if you will be finding out the gender and why you should or not. You shouldn’t eat this, you can’t do that. That phase moves onto the newborn stage where your ‘job’ is now external from you. You pull through the screaming for no reason, the wacky no-sleep schedules, the questions, the fears. Then onto the toddler years, the preschool years and then your kids start hitting the age where they can really speak — can have a conversation. It isn’t usually until your kids grow up and move on their own — perhaps starting families of their own that you may begin to hear from them — that even if you didn’t know exactly what you were doing all the time and you did make mistakes — that you are an amazing parent.

In the interim it can be hard to see those moments — the glimpses where they may not tell you that you are doing amazing but they show you. The fleeting moments that come and go between the noise and the chaos. Those moments — that if you catch — can tell you everything you want and need to hear.

This photo was one of those moments for me.

Un-staged, screen captured from a small video we took while at the zoo where Mister Speed walked up to his best friend Princess Raru and gave her a hug. The genuine, loving friendship they have with each other tells me that during those early years where I felt more then I care to admit that I had no idea what I was doing — I was getting it right all along.