“Let’s Just Sit Here, Mommy.”

An ode to the slow work of growth

It’s my thirty-seventh birthday, and the day has been quiet. The kind of quiet that feels earned. That settles into your bones and immerses itself in your breath. The weather is 69 degrees, sunny, and breezy. The day, like anything, isn’t perfect—but the weather is. On a day that typically sees rain, I’m soaking in the first signs of spring.

My 23-month-old is taking a late nap, and my four-year-old and I have just finished planting a sapling we ordered through his school in celebration of Earth Day yesterday.

We sit on our deck, and I ask him, “What do you want to do, Coley?”

He looks at me earnestly and says,

“Let’s just sit here and wait for the tree to grow.”

And it stops me.

First, I stifle my laughter– the innocence! It’s the kind of thing kids say that make you want to squeeze them– so innocent and so unaware of the passing of time. It hasn’t been thirty minutes since we dug a shallow hole into the dry earth. We gave the little tree a home beside his wooden playhouse and pressed dirt over the tiny tender roots. I begin to explain that we’d be sitting here a long time. I’m gathering my thoughts—then decide instead to just let it be.

I realize how much I love that he wants to sit here and wait for the growth to happen. That he thinks it’s worth sitting still for. He believes that if we sit long enough, we might actually see it happen in real time – that the tree that could, might stretch toward the sun right before our eyes. As if we can watch the sapling root to the earth, anchoring itself beneath the soil. As if we can witness the needles branch out in real time. I imagine watching the tree alongside his growth—a time-lapse of sorts. In my mind, he is minutes old, days old, a rolling baby, a climbing toddler. I realize that the summer-bruised, skinny-legged little boy sitting before me grew just as fast as he expects that little sapling to grow.

So maybe he isn’t so naive. Maybe he’s right.

Everyone tells you—and it’s cliché—but my baby will be five in June.
It goes SO
Fucking.
Fast.

Coley’s words are sweet, sure, but they’re also profound. He’s tapped into something: the value of presence, of patience, of bearing witness to growth, however slow it might be.

There’s something so beautiful about the fact that he notices this growth on my birthday—a day marking the passage of my own years—spent in the stillness of early spring, planting something new. A day that, this year, holds no party, only the early stirrings of a season of blooming, my little boy beside me with dirt under his fingernails. A day when something small is planted, and I remember that I, too, am still growing.

He reminds me to just be with it. With him. With the world as it stands today. I think about who I was at seventeen. How much I thought I knew. I think about the woman I was at twenty-nine, aching for clarity, measuring my worth by rapid growth in a fast-paced industry in Manhattans’ glittering sidewalks. I think about how motherhood broke me open, how I had to be replanted then. I had to sink down into a self I didn’t recognize and trust that something new would emerge from the dark soil.

Today, I am thirty-seven. The roots are still tender, but they’re holding. And I’m learning—slowly, imperfectly—to reach down before I reach out. To sit still. To trust myself. To sit quiet and witness.

So when my Cole says, “Let’s just sit here and wait for the tree to grow,” I just smile and nod.

And we wait.