It’s unlike anyplace else. It’s not a county-maintained backcountry hut. It’s not a decayed mining cabin. It’s a home: A home where the owner is never present, but the door is always open. And someone is usually there, whether visiting for a moment like us, or staying for a day or two on some kind of exotic life journey, which they are generally willing to tell us all about.

The front of the house is almost entirely glass, smeared with old smoke, which filters the sunlight and makes the view hazy and ethereal. And the view from the living room couch is jawdropping: jagged peaks 14,000 feet high soar skyward on either side, dwarfing the river that roars down the valley below.

People of all ages come to this home, which we have always called Sleepy Hollow, and it’s hard to leave without making a contribution of some kind. One year, we brought a swing to hang near the front door. Just a simple rope and a fingerpainted slab of cedar.

Other visitors’ contributions are poetic in nature. Quotes from Thoreau and Lao Tzu are scribbled in blue and red and green Sharpie all along the interior walls. These are scattered in amid a variety of drawings: sketches of mountains and spruce trees, portraits and caricatures, mushrooms and dancing Grateful Dead bears.

I have photos of each of my three children holding a Crayola marker in their tiny hands and writing in their own way on these walls about their love for this place and this valley.

On each visit, we stay just long enough to note the changes since the time before and to read the entries in the guestbook that is tucked into a shelf by the woodstove.

Since we moved from this area, we have the intention of coming back every summer – and then something happens and we often don’t. But this past weekend, we realized that this was our chance to do it before the snow started to fly, so we shoved a dozen markers in my camera bag and made the half hour or so drive to the trailhead.

When we arrive, it seems everyone remembers the way. We scramble across sheets of rock to the trail, where roots have surged through the earth in great gnarled lumps. The kids see this as a kind of staircase, a red carpet, an invitation to explore deeper into this mysterious woods. This is a forest they don’t know in the same way they know the forest around our home.

We walk, and we walk, and we walk. Soon, the roots have disappeared and there is only hard packed trail and rocks. We are close to tree-line now, so high in elevation that the only trees able to survive in this oxygen-starved place are stick-like, their trunks poking like shards of glass from the rocky ground.

“We must have missed it,” Ty says. “Let’s turn around and everyone look a little harder.”

We missed it? How can you miss a house that you know is just off the trail and that five of you are looking for? Were we too busy talking and walked right past it? Did the spruce and shrubs grow up thick around it, hiding it from view? Did it burn down? I suggest maybe we dreamt it and it never existed at all. My son suggests maybe aliens took it.

So now it’s a mystery. What was once a simple hike has become an adventure of mythic proportions for my little hobbits, and they are starting to skip. After walking awhile, I see a knoll that looks like the one the house used to stand upon, so I tell the rest of the family to find a comfortable spot to wait for a minute. “Mama’s goin’ in.” I say, and I slash and stomp through the brush. At one point I have to get down on all fours to duck under some low branches, and my Labrador leaps around me and licks my face like he’s so glad I’ve finally come to my senses and left those lanky two leggers to join him in a more primal sort of life.

Finally I emerge at the top of the hill, but there’s nothing there but more trees and shrubs and dried grass. There’s no house and no clearing and no empty burned-out foundation, so I half-tumble back down the hill and meet my family down the trail a bit. They are sitting on an outcropping and taking turns sucking water from daddy’s Camelbak.

That’s when my husband sees a tiny break in the trail we hadn’t seen before. He jumps across it, and we follow, matching the length and rhythm of his stride like ducklings. My kids are no strangers to breaking trail, and I watch how they point out the muddy spots to one another and hold the branches as they go so nothing snaps back on the hiker behind. This makes me proud in a mountain mama kind of way.

We duck and jump this way for 10 or so minutes. And that’s when we see it.

Sleepy Hollow. The house is standing there, plain as day, about half a mile from the parking lot where we started. We had overshot it by 7 or 8 times. We all laugh because hiking as a family is much, much easier  than it was on even our last visit. We no longer have to carry a kid on our backs. We no longer have to stop twice for a snack break. What used to be an ordeal would have now been a quick jog from the minivan in the parking lot.

But now we’re here. We start to scramble headlong up the hillside like goats, but it doesn’t take long to realize that something is different.

A black and red sign hangs in the front window. “Private Property. No Trespassing.” From where we stand, we can see the walls inside have been painted a semigloss white. The grass has grown around the property, concealing the once well-worn path. The swing is gone altogether.

We all just stand and stare. Ty says something about how you never know when things are going to change and you just have to enjoy them while you can. My oldest daughter nods and looks at the dirt. My other daughter shares a memory. My son wants to know if we can get our swing back.

I don’t say anything because I am filled all at once with a kind of longing. Raising my kids — out of their infancy and toddlerhood — has been kind of like this. The memories take on the cast of a dream. It’s all so wonderful and yet sometimes so strange and so distant that I can start to question whether I really lived through all those years at all. It just doesn’t seem possible.

And then I realize that I’ll probably be saying the same thing about the place I am right at this very moment in five or so years – and so there’s nothing to do but get on with the business of living this part of their childhood and enjoying it as much as I can before it, too, feels like a dream.

Today, that means a hike in the woods with my family and a hot cup of cocoa with double the marshmallows back home.

Susie Michelle Cortright is the founder of Momscape.
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I want to be the kind of mama who moves slowly and graciously, who doesn’t rush all over the place, who drifts from one place to the next, sweeping along as though there were nowhere else to be but here.

But I’ve never been good at that. I’ve never been good at lolling or loitering or sauntering or pottering. In some ways, it was easier to do when my kids were small. I look at my writing from that time of my life and I notice how I not only noticed the fine points of my day, but I took the time to write them down: The way my toddler puckered as she smeared on her Hello Kitty lip balm; the way my oldest laughed in great rollicking leaps, like a waterfall; the way my young son’s scalp smelled like the earth itself.

Author and father Piero Ferrucci, on the subject, says, “There is a sense of healthy laziness that I have learned in being with children: Slow down, take it easy, be here, enjoy yourself,” he writes. “You are allowed to have no purpose.”

I spent a decade or so – when my kids were tiny – in as close to a healthy laziness as I’m ever going to see. But now that my kids are growing up and spending more and more time away from me, I find myself grasping for purpose, just as I did before I had kids at all. I remember how I’m happier when I do have a purpose and happier still when I know what that purpose is.

When I don’t have one, I feel unconstructive, floppy and sad. I’m a little bit type A and can quote Abraham Maslow at will: “If you deliberately plan on being less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you’ll be unhappy for the rest of your life,” and: “Musicians must make music, artists must paint, poets must write if they are to be ultimately at peace with themselves. What human beings can be, they must be.”

I think that’s why things were so liberating back when my kids were home all day and relying on me for everything. I really did feel that I was allowed to have no purpose aside from them. I had a different relationship with time because I had a built-in, overriding sense of purpose by simple default.

There was a deep sense of purpose in just waking up and smiling at them and pouring their milk. There was a deep sense of purpose in sitting at the breakfast table and competitively guessing how many little fruits were in the box of Raisin Bran.

There was a deep sense of purpose in just talking with them and looking at them and worshipping them the way a mom worships her little, little kids. With that sense of purpose comes a deep sense of fulfillment. I could finally take a deep breath and feel like it satisfied something in that way down deep place.

This is one thing I noticed when my youngest child started kindergarten this past year. Suddenly someone else was responsible for each of my kids for a good chunk of the day. Someone else was feeling that sense of purpose and fulfillment and everything else I did paled in comparison to what I used to do all day.

I remember the first few months of school last year, I vacillated between a panicky sense of not getting enough work done before they stepped off the schoolbus and an empty feeling of wastefulness that made my throat cling and grab.

So I’m reflecting on all of this while I’m trying to work from home over summer vacation and my 6-year-old son comes in and he wants to play a game of cards. My first instinct is to say, “I don’t have time,” which is sort of ironic and which gets me to start thinking, “what exactly is time for, then?”

Is it for enjoying, for filling, for deciding what to do with, consciously and deliberately, with reverence and devotion? If it is, then it’s probably for playing Uno with this tan little kid who now sits across from me, holding an Uno deck in his grubby, stubby fingers, which will someday soon be man hands that will be texting his girlfriend or closing his bedroom door in my face.

And then I try to do everything I do in as slow a manner as I can. To tell the truth, it generally drives me crazy to do that for too long, but even for just a minute it helps me to have reverence for the puzzling way time passes and the way our children grow, both gradually and all at once.

It reminds me of a time when I was eating at my favorite fast food joint, which is actually this bright little cafe where they ladle steaming bowls of freshly made soup into paper to-go bowls. It’s like fast food for slow, old souls. As my kids and I were hunched over our bowls, shoveling in spoonfuls of Potato Gouda because we were late for soccer practice, a minister whom I admire very much came in and stood in line.

He did not see us there in the corner and so I know I was observing him in his natural state. I was immediately taken by the slowness that enveloped everything he did, from the way he shuffled forward in the line to the way he put his hand in his pocket to fish out his wallet. It was the way he creased the tall brown bag that held his soup and his bread and his cookie. His pace alone made him appear reverent and devout. He was paying attention. He was letting even the tedious errand of getting take-out become an experience that would surround him like a cloak.

Reflecting on this, I have to ask myself, what am I in such a hurry for? Why are we all rushing so much? Are we rushing because we like it – because we feed on the false drama? Are we rushing so that we can fit in more things or so that we can make more money? Are we rushing to make some form of mark on the world and in the meantime risk missing our own lives?

There are those friends in life (if we make time for them) whose very presence slows us down. Just being with them says, “You can’t get it all done. You are already enough just the way you are, so let us set a pace in this life that we can enjoy.”

In truth, I think that’s what a family is for. At least that’s what I hope my kids will say that their family was for, when they have grown into busy parents and are striving to slow down for themselves.

Written by Momscape founder Susie Michelle Cortright. Follow her on Twitter.

Cassidy is five, and she shares a home with two younger siblings whose demands for my eye contact are constant and loud. So I try to orchestrate this one-on-one time with her on a somewhat regular basis. I ask Grandma to watch the other kids so that we can sneak off together, and so she’ll talk to me. I’m always amazed, when I get one of the kids alone, by how very much they have to say.

“I have some running around to do,” I told Cassidy last Saturday. “Do you want to come — just you and me?” I was ready for the usual flurry of words and for the desperateness. “Don’t leave without me. Where are my shoes? Mom, don’t leave without me. Can you help me find my socks? Don’t leave without me.”
But today was different. “What’s Callie going to do?” she asked.

“She’ll stay with Grandma.”

“Do you think Grandma would doctor my baby?” Grandma, a retired school nurse, would most certainly doctor her baby, and she probably wouldn’t be looking at the clock and thinking about the cruddy dishes in the sink while she did it, either, like the dolly’s regular doctor.

And so it was settled. I had to remind myself that this is the same kid who, just six weeks before, was chasing me down the driveway shouting “One More Kiss!” when I left her with daddy one evening to ever-so-subtly bolt for a gallon of milk, a loaf of bread, and ten minutes of peace and quiet at the 7-11 on the corner. Leaving the kids had always made me feel a little guilty but also very, very central and very, very important.

So I left that day, and Cassidy gave me a peck and a quick wave because Grandma had determined that her favorite baby doll had a rather high fever and was at that moment offering detailed instructions on what she, as a good mummy, could do to help.

I missed Cassidy that day as I ran my errands. I missed feeling the way her hand fits into mine. Everyone says we have the same hands. Long, skinny fingers; bulky knuckles, square nails. Eternally dry. I missed the self-conscious way she holds her mouth between sips of hot cocoa that makes me wonder if she’s not imaging herself to be Cinderella. I missed feeling the way time spent alone with my daughter makes me feel — like the queen, with nothing to do but allow each glorious moment to perch on my tongue for a time, like a communion wafer.

The passage of time is an enigmatic thing when you have small kids. In fact, there are two remarks that parents of young children hear at least daily. They are: “You sure have your hands full,” and “Oh, the time goes so fast.”

I’ve always been fond of meeting that lament with a reminder to those older, wiser parents that the years sometimes seem to go faster than the actual days. But now I’m starting to see. I’m starting to look back on the last five years, and I’m starting to wonder where it went. Wondering if Cassidy will still hold my hand in a year or two as we walk the crowded downtown streets with our hot chocolate. If she’ll still look at me like the queen. If I’ll soon be telling the tired mothers I pass that oh, the time goes so fast.

There was a time in the not-so-distant past when I would actually look forward to the time each week following our trip to the supermarket when I would have all three kids strapped safely in their carseats so that I could take one guilt-free minute to push the cart to its corral, to hear my shoes scratching across the cement, to notice any birds in the sky and whether the air felt cold against my skin. One lone time-out minute from my life with three kids under age 6 when, yes, I had my hands really, really full.

But I shock myself by writing that last line in the past tense. Clearly, I’m having trouble knowing just what I want the time to do. This week, I’ve spent time looking for life’s rewind, fast forward, and still-pause. Sometimes all at once. But, even as I’m lamenting the time that is gone, I’m beginning to learn how to slow time for myself with pure reverence. Reverence for the process, and for the puzzling way time passes and the way our children grow, both gradually and all at once. And then to resignedly watch time slip through my hands with a detachment and a sense of grace that comes from respecting the process; the drifting, the slipping, the rushing of time that is gone. To hold each of those God-given moments and then to release it, ripe for another.

The final preparations began weeks ago. We headed to Denver two weeks prior to the baby’s due date to avoid any possible, if remote, chance of not making the 90-mile trip to the hospital in time. On March 14th, I visited the OB for my 40-week checkup, and he told me nothing was progressing and he could induce my labor when he returned from vacation 12 days later.

Within a few hours of leaving his office, I was calling to let him know that my contractions were two minutes apart, 20 seconds long. He told me to call when they spaced out to 5-minute intervals, each one minute in duration. I labored in my childhood bedroom, waiting for the contractions to change. They only got more intense.

While I tried to let my body go limp and ride out each contraction, I felt my body and spirit divorce. The pain became a sort of entity, something my body handled while my spirit floated somewhere nearby waiting it out.

The March issue of O Magazine features an empowering essay about surrendering to the pain of childbirth, of remembering the purpose that it serves and emerging on the other side with a greater sense of peace and power. In the article “Labor of Love,” Thandie Newton writes, “I can see why people describe it as pain, but it’s so much more than that. It is a magnificent pain, an extraordinary out-of-body sensation, a humbling one.” I read her words over and over again to myself, waiting for my husband/labor coach to arrive.

As it turned out, Ty would make it to the hospital about an hour after the birth. It took him nearly five hours to make the 90-mile drive in the worst road conditions of the winter. My contractions never did get much longer than 20 seconds until they were one on top of another, and my mom and I arrived at the hospital with just 16 minutes to spare.

When the OB resident finally okayed me to push, I said, “I can’t believe my husband isn’t going to make it.”
“Well,” he said, “Neither is your doctor.” Three pushes and several minutes later, our little bundle of joy was born. My mom entered the room just before the baby did, and I cut the cord myself.

I got what I have so desperately wanted since my first daughter was born via c-section: a traditional, natural childbirth. I yearned to behold the exhilaration of this pain culminating in the most overwhelming of human experiences. I wasn’t disappointed. I have a beautiful new daughter, a new relationship with my body, a new sense of power in my role as a mother and as a woman, and a renewed sense of awe for a Creator who could make all of this come about.

There is nothing quite so blissful as nursing a newborn baby. Meanwhile, my rough-and-tumble toddler is revealing a more soft and gentle side. It’s as though these sisters have known one another forever. Perhaps they have.

We have named this baby sister Calliope after the Greek mythological muse of poetry. After all, my girls are my inspiration. They are the elements of life that make me understand, once and for all, why I’m here. They make every morning Christmas, awaiting all of the surprises that are gift-wrapped in their little souls. Now we revel in unwrapping them one by one.

The heartburn is so bad I have to sleep sitting up, I want a nap about an hour after I get out of bed, and the baby’s incessant, claustrophobic punches assure me that she’s ready for action. But if I could only suspend time.

Cassie, my two-year-old, has reached a kind of golden age. She is curious and honest and kind. As her language develops at pace with her self-consciousness, I have to hide my giggles – and my outright admiration – until she is tucked into bed and I can share the day’s gems with my husband.

Now, I don’t doubt that I will love our second child as much as I do the first. And I’m sure that holding daughter number two will bring the same indescribable flood of emotion that holding Cassie does. But I also know that, in some small ways, things will change, and everything is so very, very good right now.

And so the unexpected emotions continue: A bit of guilt in the knowledge that there will soon be someone to compete for my time and attention. A bit of fear. A sense of mourning for the loss of my one-on-one relationship with this precious little person. And the yearning to stop time.

Because Cassie’s delivery was early and fast and because we’re a good two hour’s drive from the hospital, we are packing for a temporary move as delivery day nears – doctor’s orders. Both sets of grandparents live in the city where we’ll deliver, so we’ll hole up at my mom’s house for a few weeks before and maybe a week after. Early in the pregnancy, I was relieved that we had a plan, but, as the day approaches, the idea makes me weepy.

It’s not because I’d rather be home. I love visiting my parents. And it’s not because I’m afraid of breaking Cassie’s routine, though that’s what I’ve been telling everyone. My motives are much more selfish. It’s because I know it will make me let go of her two weeks before I’m due.

You see, the very presence of one of her grandparents pretty much ensures that she won’t notice her mom is even in the room. And if she does notice, instead of climbing my legs to settle on my hip or asking me to play “run real fast,” or to draw a pig or to dance to Blondie, she’ll push her arm out at me in classic two-year old defiance. Sometimes, she even asks me to go away.

I smile and try to understand the way my husband does. I try to understand that it’s because she doesn’t see her grandparents as often as she sees me. That she knows I’ll always be there for her so she doesn’t feel the need to cling. That I am the enforcer of rules, and the rules are different at Grandma’s. But it kills me. I mean, it hurts somewhere deep to see just how quickly the irreplaceable is suddenly and firmly replaced.

Having lived the pattern nearly each weekend for a while, I’ll make the move knowing what is to come. But, for the next week or so, Cassie’s daddy and I will be hogging her, night and day, and hogging all the time we have left. And I’ll be thinking about how the whole situation is a metaphor for motherhood and the sacrifices we make each day for the good of our kids – for the health of the soon-to-be born and the well-being of the child that is. Even when it means doing something that just may hurt our hearts.

And I’ll be thinking about all you moms who recognize that, even before our children are born, their needs are paramount. I’ll be thinking about all of you who recognize the fundamental nature of being a mother and who inspire yourselves each day to be the best mom you can be in spite of your own wishes and wants and motivations.

Here’s to you all.

In my conversations with these friends, it’s all I can do not to get teary when they talk about how excited they are for the baby’s birth. Because, as all moms know, no matter how prepared they say they are, they have no idea what’s about to hit them.

Sure, I could tell them, but it wouldn’t make a difference. No one can put into words how profoundly your life changes when your children are born.

It’s such a common thing to say that it has become a cliché: “Your first child will change your life more than you could have ever thought possible.”

And then the second you lay eyes on that baby, you get it. The understanding is instantaneous and overwhelming. You realize that what everyone has been trying to tell you is true, times a thousand.

No longer do we live for ourselves. We live for a seven-pound, wrinkly bundle. Our world-view widens. We understand the true definition of “tired.” Bodily fluids cease to make us gag. And, suddenly, the only thing we want to do on a Saturday night is to watch the baby sleep until we drift off ourselves.

The biology of motherhood I more or less understand, but the emotion of motherhood is incomprehensible. Still, amid play groups, car pools, and endless vacuuming, even the best moms sometimes lose touch with the surge of emotion that entered our lives the same time our children did.

My little miracle is in the exasperating “no” stage. She hates the word when it is directed at her but is rather fond of saying it herself.

On a particularly frustrating day last week when she had me checking the clock every 15 minutes waiting for the little hand to reach the 6 (the hour my husband typically comes home), I finally put her in the bathtub–the one place she’s always content.

I sat on the stool near the tub and flipped through a magazine, preparing myself for the remaining hours in the day. After a few minutes, I whisked a towel around her and relied on the Teletubbies to entertain her while I rounded up her new outfit.

When I returned, Cassie was standing in the middle of the living room floor, mouth wide open, staring at the TV, her pronounced toddler belly balancing atop two bowed legs. She was playing with her belly button.

What I experienced then can only be called a parental epiphany. Perhaps it was her nakedness that made me realize that my toddler, resolute on exerting her independence, was just as vulnerable and dependent as ever. And the indescribable rush of love, responsibility, and sheer joy hit me square in the face with as much force as it had the day she was born. I would like us all to remind one another how much our babies need us—no matter how tall they have grown.

So during those inevitable days they spend attached to your left leg, or drawing on the wallpaper, or spending time in the principal’s office, we will reflect on the day of their birth, when two new spirits entered the world: a child and a mother.

Since long before Cassie could talk, we’ve been trying to eke out words from her babbled syllables. Did she just say “I love you?” my husband, Ty, would ask, and we agreed that she probably did, though we both secretly suspected she was just blowing bubbles with her spit.

Now, she is 21-months old and is capable of other three-word combinations. She can say “Mommy’s going potty” in a crowded public restroom right before she opens the door on me. She can say “Cassie, be careful” right before she breaks something. She parrots just about everything we say, particularly those four-letter words that sometimes sneak into our conversations uninvited. But each time we prompt her to say “I love you,” she squints at us, her face pinched and uncharacteristically serious. And she tucks in her top lip the way I did when I was a kid and someone told me to “button it.”

It’s not that we are worried about her language abilities or about her love for us. Actions speak louder than words, especially when you’re only old enough to know and understand a handful of them. But these are the words that melt a mommy’s heart. Ty has reasoned that Cassie simply understands the emotional magnitude of these words and that she is waiting for just the right time to say them.

It got a little silly one day last month when I broke down and bought a Barney videotape. The purple dinosaur has my child securely under an eerie kind of spell, but the video affords me 30 uninterrupted minutes to blow dry my hair, clean the breakfast dishes, and make a few business calls, so I will admit, I use it when I must. At the end of each episode, Barney sends out a ringing: “And remember, I love you!” The first time Cassie watched the video, she looked right at the screen to say – plain as day, “Love you, Barney.” So much for emotional magnitude. From my place at the kitchen sink, I made a mental note to ignore that detail when filling out the baby book.

We tell her we love her about 30 times a day, not in hope that she will say it back but because both of us were raised to say the words when the mood strikes us, which, happily, is quite a lot these days. After the Barney incident, we both sort of stopped listening for the reply. But we have a little game we continue to play. It’s a silly exchange I say throughout the day because it makes her hug me.

It begins with me asking “Hey Cassie…Do you know what?”

Then I have to tell her what to say. “Say ‘what,’” I whisper.

“What?”

“I love you,” I say. Then I scoop her up and bounce her around for awhile.

It’s one of those silly sing-song things that just seems to evolve in every family. And, this morning, it must have been on Cassie’s mind. We were late for playgroup. I was weaving around Cassie in the kitchen, slapping together PB&Js for our picnic lunch. I had left the fridge door open and Cassie was sucking Hershey’s syrup out of the squeeze bottle. She was squeezing hard, and the excess bubbled out onto her chin. When I leaned down to rinse her off and move the chocolate to a higher shelf, it became obvious that she needed a diaper change. Fast. I was about to say, “Do you know what? We need to hurry up and change you and get you in the car.”
But she thought we were playing the game, and so she interrupted me right after the “Do you know what?”

“I love you,” she said. And then she grinned in a shy way, as though she had just presented me with a painting or a play-dough sculpture or some kind of special project, something she had made all by herself, something that had taken her an awfully long time. I suppose she had.