Julie Helen: Growing up and growing older, together

“I’m four and a half Mommy! I’m so big!” The extra six months in the tallying of his age is important to my son. It is particularly crucial because he is preparing for big school in September. We will have moved to West Cork before he joins his new class and there’s lots of change afoot. He has regular conversations with me about being “big” at the moment which sometimes makes me want to scoop him up into my arms and tell him to slow down and be small because being a grown up is entirely overrated with the exception of having children because I got him out of that deal, the greatest prize of all.

I tend not to dwell on Ricky being big or small but he’s definitely fixated on it right now. This week he is at summer camp with his friends. He is beaming with delight and when we were talking about him being in a new place, he reminded me that he’s good at meeting new people. If he’s shy or unsure of himself, he will plunge his thumb in his mouth for comfort and all bets about being big are off the table. 

His independence is a joy to watch but sometimes when I see him sucking his thumb I am reminded that he’s still my baby and it’s okay to be young and unsure.

As we talk about the house move and we travel back and forth getting ready, I can sense how he is trying to figure it all out and sometimes it gets a bit overwhelming and he can be quick to cry or lash out.

I pull him onto my lap to let him curl up in a safe place and he’s so tall now he can barely fit but I remind him that I understand that there’s a lot of change happening now and he’s doing new things and even though he’s really good at meeting new people, it’s okay to find it hard sometimes.

I was surprised at how much an acknowledgement of things feeling hard helped immediately. It was like saying it meant he could hold onto being big like he wants to.

There is something powerful in acknowledgement. Sometimes to deal with the exhaustion I experience due to my disability, I tend to plough on or try to power through. There’s a part of me that wants prove that I’m good at being a grown up or being big too. In times of change though I definitely experience a sense of being overwhelmed, that all the little tasks feel like a lot. I try to remind myself that if it was Ricky who was feeling overwhelmed, I would slow him down and remind him that he’s great. It’s easy to do as a parent, but not quite so easy to do for myself. Acknowledging that life feels full or intense really helps and then I just have to put action behind it to keep the show on the road.

On the flipside to wanting to feel big or grown up, this is the year when the majority of my close friends begin to turn 40 and we are each greeting such a milestone with different emotions as we start to plan some celebrations weeks and months in advance. It appears, that getting big is no longer such an exciting prospect and has different connotations now, but each stage of life brings challenges and contentment in different ways. We don’t get to go back so getting bigger and older, however we feel about it, is the only option and we are lucky to be able to go through it together.