>Breaking Away

My daughter is only four and already I am reminded in very small ways that she is less and less “mine” each day.

I think of this whenever I bathe her and her brother. Unlike baby Bruiser, who readily offers his arms and legs to be washed, Punky has begun keeping her limbs close to her body, covering herself and resisting with giggles as I try to wash under her arms. She shields herself instinctively and it’s something that’s new for her.

I remember a time not very long ago when she offered up her limbs to be washed just as Bruiser did. She seemed to have no notion of her body as anything other than an extension of mine. Now, though, she’s recognizing her arms and legs as her own, along with her tummy, which she laughingly shields with her little hands as I scrub.

I have to confess, it makes me a little sad each time she resists, and yet I know she is developing according to the order of things. I think now that I didn’t properly appreciate the bathing ritual when she was two. As a result, I do my best to enjoy bath time with Bruiser, and to see it as a precious and relatively short-lived experience rather than a chore. I revel in the ease with which he raises his arms to me and says “Baths! Baths!” as I run the water. I adore the openness in his eyes as he stares at me, waiting for his “choo choo train” cup that he fills with water in the bath. I love how he holds still so that I can put on a visor over his curls, to keep the water out of his eyes.

I know now, thanks to his sister that it won’t be too long before he begins to find his own sense of self, of personal space, of boundaries- before he begins to realize that he, too, is more than an extension of me. Before he begins the process of breaking away.

Other mothers have told me that it all goes by too fast, and for a while it was hard to believe them. Motherhood is a gift, but it is also one of the most monotonous duties I’ve ever experienced. Particularly before I had freelance work to take up all my spare time, the hours spent playing with blocks and reading children’s books at times seemed interminable.

Now, though, I’m finding that the other mothers were right, in a sense. It’s not that the time flies by for me, it’s that when it’s gone, I can’t get it back. And I miss it horribly.

I love watching my children grow, but my husband and I have both wished that it were possible to return to each year of our children’s lives for an hour or so whenever we wanted to, to go back to when Punky was one or two or three, even if just for an hour or two, and hold her in our arms again, or help her learn to walk, or put her hair in tiny ponytails. It’s hard to accept that those once-familiar experiences with her now are gone forever.

It’s even harder to accept that those times are gone with our older girls, that they’ll never again hold my hand when we cross the street together, or let me put their hair into buns, or sit in my lap or beg me to stay with them wherever they are in the house.

As parents, we love who our children are becoming, but we desperately miss who they were.

And how could I ever have known that what’s sure to be a lifetime of breaking away and bittersweet longing would begin at four, with bath time?

This post originally appeared on Parents.com.