Mom is the hardest job of all.

What children take from us, they give…We become people who feel more deeply, question more deeply, hurt more deeply, and love more deeply. -Sonia Taitz

Chris and I went to Six Flags to play at Hurricane Harbor for a while yesterday afternoon. It was our 'last day of summer' as he is gone today with his Dad (he left early this weekend for his Aunt Mary's wedding), we have plans to spend the day Monday shopping for school clothes and supplies, and I start my new job Tuesday. He's going to spend two weeks with my parents, then we are moving, then he's got a week of YMCA camp in St. Charles, then he's off to school. Already. Yesterday was the last real day of our summer off together.

Children might or might not be a blessing, but to create them and then fail them was surely damnation. -Lois McMaster Bujold

I was up so late last night in tears. Really sobbing. It was miserable. Frankly, I'm not in much better shape right now. I feel like I used to when Chris was a tiny baby, and I'd sit up with him in the middle of the night holding him and trying hard to cry silently as he nursed himself back to sleep. I knew those nights were precious and would be a distant memory all too soon. I'm immersed in a deep sense of loss. I don't just feel that yesterday was our last day of this summer. I feel the weight of the things we should have done, the weight of the days we didn't interact at all, the weight of the days we didn't set foot outside of the apartment. I don't know that I'll ever have another entire summer off to spend with my son. I don't know that he would appreciate it if I did. I hate to think that I've squandered the age of eight. I am not sure when boys make the turn into nasty adolescents, but I know it happened to me at twelve. God, what I wouldn't do to have another day, another week, a time warp - something! I wish our whole summer could have been spent in the same sense of discovery and family that we had during our camping trip.

The central struggle of parenthood is to let our hopes for our children outweigh our fears. -Ellen Goodman

This really is tough. I'm the mother of an only child, so he gets to bear all of my hopes and fears, all of my anxiety and joy, and of course, all of my maternal love.

My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it. -Mark Twain