Emily McCluhan

Just For a Visit

At a certain age, kids become a big part of your world, whether they are your own or someone else’s. I’m at that age.

I’m also in a much better place when it comes to kids than I was about five years ago when I was living in two worlds: one where I struggled to accept that I wasn’t going to have children, and the other where I squealed with excitement and happiness for my friends who were. And if I’m being honest, it wasn’t all happiness but some mix of jealousy and happiness. Those feelings would manifest as anything from expressing genuine joy for a future mom announcing her pregnancy, to happily not holding her baby and slowly backing away when the conversation turned to diaper blowouts and infected nipples.

I don’t know when or how it shifted, but I think it was somewhere around the time when I realized that my marriage needed to end and not having kids in a broken relationship was something to be grateful for. That specific shift is fresh in my mind, but putting my finger on other decisions and turning points in my life is getting harder and harder as I get older.

That realization came to light recently when I was at my friend Nicole’s house for a backyard get-together. Another friend, Natalie, asked to hold Nicole’s six-month-old son, reaching her arms out in anticipation. She bounced the baby on her lap, cooed and smiled at him, and he smiled and giggled back. We all watched, admiring how a baby can hold court in a circle of adults.

“I want to go back and visit my kids at this age,” Natalie said as her five-year-old son raced around the backyard with his cheeks flushed and hair plastered to his forehead. We laughed, but her comment grabbed at something inside of me.

On its surface, it sounded like the non-stop whirlwind of energy from her son as he chased Nicole’s chickens and made the rest of us cringe and raise our eyebrows, exhausted her. But I didn’t hear her saying that she wished her own kids were babies again, or that she wanted more babies...she just wanted to visit them at that age and enjoy the snuggles and giggles for a moment because it was all so fleeting. Maybe that baby phase made an imprint on her heart, but the tornado of her son was a fine trade for the sleepless nights, teething, diapers, and communicating through tears and fussing.

I appreciated her acknowledgement of what she’d been through to get to this point in time, and I wanted to believe that everything she’d learned along the way is what quietly powers her actions today.

Mostly, I wanted to believe that for myself.

With no children of my own, the only person to go back and visit is me. Would I want to educate my past self on the outcomes of my life to this point to somehow change things or make them better? Or just let the education play out?

I think it’s the latter for most of the paths I’ve chosen. But I’d love to view myself through my current lens that is slowly gaining clarity as I accept who I am and where I’ve been. Would I understand why I made the decisions that I did, or why I acted the way I did? Would my current reasoning for those decisions line up with what I was actually thinking at the time? Or is my current reasoning clouded to justify or diminish my “mistakes” when things didn’t work out as expected?

Either way, Natalie’s comment that day gave me the opportunity to reflect and have some grace and appreciation for my younger self and how I got here. I lived my life. I made decisions with the information I had, and I’m here today living in a place that lets me grow and reflect. That appreciation also makes it easier to have some compassion for my friends when their three-year-old is screaming just to scream, or their five-year-old is harassing chickens. I even reach for their babies and happily snuggle and play with them with no regret for what could’ve been.