The last baton

Back when L. was just a baby, Scott and I coined the word "tag-team parenting"--well, maybe we weren't the first to coin it, but we certainly felt like pioneers in that make-it-up-as-you-go territory. I distinctly remember the first time the phrase popped into my head. I had parked our old Dodge Grand Caravan at the Hardy's parking lot opposite the bus stop where the free university shuttle dropped off and picked up. I was nursing--or trying to nurse--an unhappy L. who was bundled into layers of onesies and a sweater (it was October and COLD). Just as I had finally managed to negotiate the layers of clothing and L.'s fussiness and had gotten him to finally latch on I saw the front of the bus appearing in the distance. I knew I had only about four minutes tops to get us out of the car, across the small parking lot, and to the stop so I'd be ready to pass L. off to Scott and board the bus myself. Just like a baton, I thought to myself. When I told Scott about that image later that night we dubbed our daily "baton passing" as tag-team parenting. Little did we think, back in those novel and difficult early days of parenting that we'd still be racing about from one place to the next, still juggling impossible loads, still passing the precious child baton some nine years later. Years ago when T. was born we talked about whether our schedules, our sanity, our jobs would allow us to continue on tag-teaming it, or whether we'd be better off finding other options for T.--day care, part-time nanny--something. The decision was made fairly easily by the fact that we didn't have the money to pay for outside care, but more importantly we had made a commitment when we first became parents with L., that we would try and go it ourselves--that we would both roll up our sleeves and make it work, and since we pulled it off with L., we wanted T. to get the same opportunity--even if it meant continuing the insanity for five more years. It hasn't been easy. With little time on campus to get work done, we both end up with way too much work spilling over into the evenings and weekends. I have changed by necessity over the years into a person often running on overdrive. I walk fast (a colleague once told me she sees a cloud of dust behind me everywhere I go, I move so fast), I look at the clocks constantly, I eat quickly, I multi-task like crazy everywhere I go, and I work from home more than I would like to. I have spent eight years switching (sometimes too abruptly) on and off between roles in parking lots, moving in minutes from a world of work and into the sticky-sweet, colorful, noisy, world of my children. I've felt over-taxed at times, sometimes resentful that I haven't had the time to finish a project at work, or that no one--not my kids, not Scott, not my work colleagues, has gotten the best parts of me. Being spread too thin gets old at times--and tiring, and very, very frustrating. But we made it. On Thursday T. will head off to her first day of all-day kindergarten. For the first time since we became parents I won't be rushing from my office to the car at lunchtime. I won't pull up alongside the minivan at the parking lot outside Scott's campus building, and slip inside, off to some adventure with T. before L.'s school lets out. Am I sad? Of course I am (don't you know me by now?)--in that nostalgic, lump-in-throat way I get whenever the clock inches heavily forward a notch and we shift into another stage of our parenting. Even writing this make my eyes tear up, and I feel the bittersweet weight of this transition pressing on me, sometimes painfully. But I feel lucky and triumphant, too--lucky that we had the choice to do things this way in the first place, and triumphant that we made it this far; that despite how bone-achingly difficult it's been at times to negotiate it all, despite how many balls we've had to keep in the air at once, now at a time when I'm feeling hard-pressed to continue this crazy, frenetic, tag-team parenting type of life (I'm one week away from forty, remember?), daily life just might get a little easier. Maybe.
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