It Won’t Always Be This Way
Now I Lay Me
Down to Sleep,
I Pray the Lord
My Soul to Keep,
If I Should Fly
Before I Wake,
I Pray the Lord My Soul to Take.
Tucking my three daughters and yours into the camper’s bunkbeds—head to foot, head to foot, like kippers in a can—they fuss, saying:
There’s not enough room to sleep.
I hoist myself up and look at the four of them and have to agree.
But you say, Twenty years ago, when your mom was fifteen and I was nineteen, we went out West in a camper.
We lay there on a bed converted from a table, and I cried while playing with her hair, knowing our girlhood days were ending. So be grateful for this time you get to be close, because it won’t always be this way.
And it’s not.
Almost a year since we had last seen each other—we who had once played Barbies every Tuesday night while our carpenter fathers hammered lyric and melody together into an ark that was going to ferry us all to Nashville.
Our dream-full fathers were younger then than we are now. I can see it sometimes—the dimples that have become tally marks; the silver minnow flashes in our waterfall hair. You, who had taught me to color outside the lines and to swim in a crawdad creek so shallow, I could easily stand up.
We are middle-aged, and yet what does that mean for our mothers and fathers?
You say, I don’t mind growing older, I just mind what Time brings.
Loss.
Time brings the loss of girlhood. The loss of dreams. The eventual loss of our mothers who once tucked us into bed and sang:
Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, I Pray the Lord My Soul to Keep.
You remember how my mother had changed If I Should Die to Fly?
Even then, I had shied from death. Even then, I did not want anything to change.
But Time is bringing change. We are growing older, and our daughters are growing up.
One day, our parents will be gone just as their parents before them, and we will be the ones holding the line until we join them, too.
And our daughters will tuck their children—our grandchildren—into bed like kippers in a can, and they will fuss, saying:
There’s not enough room to sleep.
But our daughters will say, Be grateful for this time you get to be close, because it won’t always be this way.