So we’re sitting at the table mowing down this bag of grapefruit and my kids are extolling its virtues. They squeeze the fruit into their bowls and then slurp it up.

My husband says, “It’s great fruit, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it’s really fantastic,” I say.

My son says, “I love it, but the name is weird. I mean, it’s nothing like a grape. And a grape is already a fruit.”

“It’s one of life’s great mysteries,” I say.

“Wait a second,” my husband says, “Is it grapefruit – or greatfruit?”

“Are you pulling my leg?” I laugh, but, alas, he is earnest.

The expression on his face is quizzical. “Well, which is it?”

My 12 year old daughter looks down at her bowl of juice and shakes her head. “Oh, dad.”

I pick up the sack from the table and shake it toward him, label up. “5 pounds of Texas Sweet ruby red grapefruit.”

“Huh. Well, would you look at that.”

“In all your 39 years, did this never come up?”

“I kind of remember someone laughing at me and correcting me, once. In my teens,” he reflects. “But it truly IS great. And I like that name for it more. So I think I forgot that it was really grapefruit. To me, it will always be greatfruit. It should be greatfruit.”

You know, it really should be. There is nothing grape-like about it. We’ve all noticed this at some point at some breakfast table in our past.

The thing is, I honestly can’t tell if he’s kidding. Did he know it was ‘grapefruit’ all along?

You see, my husband is rather a…, uh, a visionary. He has a brain that is so sharp and so creative – and also so focused – that ordinary things – such as which side of the envelope the stamp goes on – completely escape his notice.

He has a friend like this as well. His name is Steve and, years ago, he came to spend a few days with us. On his last day, he insisted on making us dinner. He went to the market and brought back a number of ingredients, including a do-it-yourself pizza dough in which you add water, press to the pan, add toppings and serve.

Steve banged around for a bit in our galley kitchen and soon had the pizza in the oven. After 20 minutes, he checked the pizza, but the crust “wasn’t quite there,” he said. Twenty more minutes. Nope, that crust still needed more time.

After an hour, I went to take a look. I opened the oven door to a mass of pasty goo topped with watery cheese and oozy sauce dripping off the pan, down the rack, and into the oven below. There was also smoke and a funny smell.

“Huh,” I said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like that.”

“I think I must have done something wrong,” Steve explains. “The crust recipe said to add a cup of water, but it didn’t say what size cup.” He fishes a 64 ounce tumbler out of the sink.

Judging by the bubbling crud all over the inside of my oven, he really had added 8 times the amount of water he was supposed to.

To this day, a decade later, my husband swears it was a joke. He swears that Steve had known all along and had done all this to mess with me. We shall never know.

But I know that my husband knew the word was grapefruit. He did. Right?

It looks very rustic and cool sitting there, but certainly not seaworthy, and, because it’s so cool, we stop and get out to get a closer look. Admittedly, I know nothing about boats, and this one looks a bit like it’s made of paper mache. You can see where the strips of material meet the wood on the frame.

“I think it’s just for decoration,” I say. “Where would we put such a thing in our tiny house?”

“No,” he says, laughing at me. “It’s a canvas canoe, and it’s sweet! I’ve always wanted one of these things!”

Oh dear. He wants to buy it.

Fortunately, we are running late to this T-Ball game and there’s no time at all to shop or to haggle in a yard sale. I say, with cheer: “Oh, well, would you look at that? I guess if it’s meant to be, that canoe will be there when we get back!” and then I cross my fingers and my toes and my knees and even twist my hair and hope that it gets sold in the next hour or two.

Ty can think of little else during my son’s game, and just as soon as the Capri Suns and orange slices are distributed, we head straight back to that garage sale. My fingers are still crossed, but there it is, though it has been moved to the front. Hundreds of people must have passed it on by. Ty can’t believe our good fortune!

Also, lucky for us, it is now late morning, which means the proprietor of the garage sale has had a couple of Bloody Marys, and she’s feeling generous. She takes whatever cash Ty offers her and throws in 5 sad and mopey-looking life vests. It’s truly our lucky day.

So now we have a new canoe. Before we leave, the tipsy lady tells us that it “takes on a little water.”

“Does that mean it leaks?” I ask my husband, once we’re back in the truck.

“Probably just slowly.” Oh phew. Our new boat just leaks slowly.

I’ll take it somewhere safe.” He adds and goes on to describe an area of our local reservoir where it’s shallow. They can stick close to land. And there are those lifevests, of course.

“You mean you’re taking the kids”

“Really, Susanna. It’s a canoe. When I was their age, I was rowing canoes, by myself, all over the place. But, I know, you like your children to stay on land.”

“Yes.”

“You don’t much like the water.”

“Right.”

“And you don’t much like the air, either.”

“Right.” I cringe when we board an airplane. Also, amusement park rides.

“And, when we’re on the land, you’d really prefer us to go quite slowly.”

I correct him. “Slowly and carefully.” He knows this is true, though, really, I do my best to never let the kids in on my secret obsessive fears for them. I know it’s important to let them do things. I know my fear will pass on to them and make them afraid to try things and that’s no good for anyone. I just also know that I have to fret, every now and again. And again and again. Secretly, in private, hushed and alone. I’ve gotten quite good at it.

Anyway, it’s a tiny canoe – really only built for one adult and a small child, so the boys are the first to try it out.

They pack a snack in the small Igloo cooler, and they are off. I trust my husband and I know that the less I know about their plan, the better. I trust my husband, I keep telling myself. He would never put my son in harm’s way. I trust my husband. I trust my husband. I trust my husband. Pointless affirmations are a major part of any good no-public-fretting strategy.

I busy myself with making chocolate chip cookies with my daughters so as not to keep checking the clock- and when they return some time later, my son is wide eyed and wind blown. I feel like it must feel when your son has returned from college, or from another country, or from war. I feel like I’ve missed out on something mythic and important in his young life.

It is clear that they have just shared an adventure of Huckleberry Finn proportions. “Tell me all about it,” I say to my son once Ty has disappeared to make room for our new canoe somewhere, hanging from the rafters in our packed-to-the-gills garage.

This is when my son describes to me how they sang “Down by the Bay” and made up silly rhymes as they rowed and how they went from one island to another.

“First, we went to Cheese Island, which is where we ate the cheese we packed.”

“Okay.”

“And then we went to Orange Cream Soda Island, where we drank the Orange Cream Soda, which was really good. We had to go over the wavy straights, which was fun except the windy water kept getting in my mouth. Daddy said next time we shouldn’t go out on the lake when there’s whitecats.”

“Whitecaps. Okay, then where did you go?”

“Drain Island. That’s where we drained the boat.”

“Oh.”

“Then we rowed back to where we parked. We ate Doritos there. So it was all totally safe, mommy” he says. And then he says maybe next time Daddy could go by himself if he wanted to.

And do you know what? Daddy did.

I’ve heard this many times: The notion that parenting doesn’t ever get any easier – it just changes. And one thing is true: The questions my kids ask now are harder to answer. The problems my kids have now are harder to solve. But I think that we say parenting doesn’t get easier because we want to emphasize that parenting never becomes less important – and that is most certainly true. Good parenting at age 14 is no less important than good parenting at age 1 or age 4 or age 22. But the fact is: Day-to-day life DOES get easier.

My kids are each out of diapers and sleeping through the night. Two of them are in school full time and one enjoys preschool a couple days a week. Yet, their time in infancy is still so fresh in my mind that I haven’t forgotten waking up every two hours to feed the baby, having to work in the middle of the night because I couldn’t cram enough in during the day, the sheer physical exhaustion that came with being pregnant while chasing toddlers. And the restlessness that came with the feeling that I was losing touch with the person that I was even amid the bliss of new motherhood.

I don’t have teenagers yet, so in a few years, I may have to amend this message, but I feel compelled to whisper this fact to every bleary-eyed mom with a double stroller. It DOES get easier.

At some point, you will begin to sleep – ALL night long. Maybe not every night, but you will come off chronic sleep deprivation. You will feel less moody and less tired and more like the woman you remember being. And that will make everything you do seem infinitely easier.

At some point, your kids will begin to buckle their own seatbelts, tie their own shoes, and brush their own teeth. It will be a treat to take them out to dinner, and vacations will be time for relaxing, not just more work for you. At some point, your kids will ask for what they want using complete sentences, and they will, on some level, understand a rational explanation of why it is or is not in their best interest to want such a thing.

At some point, your clothes will look roughly the same at the end of the day as they did at the beginning. At some point, you will actually go for days — weeks, even — without having anything to do with your child’s poop.

At some point, you will regain your professional identity, though it’s sure to be a new and more mature variety. At some point, you will have time to volunteer for causes that are important to you. At some point, you will be able to read an entire book before its due date at the library. At some point, when you clean your house in the morning, it will be clean all the way until the kids get off the school bus in the afternoon. At some point – and this is really strange – but at some point, you will come into your home and it will be quiet.

And when this happens, you will have some remarkable little people (who are a lot like you) to chat with and to laugh with and to share your life with. You will also – and I can say this with certainty – miss all of those things that are making your life not so very easy right now.

I suppose I feel compelled to say all of this because when we can see a light at the end of the tunnel, it makes it easier to settle into our days and to enjoy them, just the way they are. Because life with kids never gets any better than it does when they are small. It doesn’t get any less exciting or any less fulfilling. And it certainly doesn’t get any less important. It just gets…different. May you find light in every single age and every single stage.