Pants-Free Parenting: Story time — The good, bad, ugly

Every night, before I fall asleep, I regale my husband with stories from the day. I tell him how our 23-month-old dumped dishwasher soap down the sink while I went to the bathroom, or how my daughter took my hand and told me my voice was 'too in charge” and could I talk in a 'nicer way”?

He listens and laughs. I know he misses the kids during the day and often feels left out of our adventures to the children's museum or park. But I don't tell the stories for him, not really. I tell the stories for me. Each little anecdote helps me piece together my day. I arrange them like a mosaic - playing dark and light against one another. I'll tell a funny story - the baby patted his diaper and yelled, 'Penis for pee-pee” at the mailman. And then something frustrating - my daughter calling her brother a 'blockhead” and spitting at me from the timeout stool. Putting these stories together, side by side, helps me see them in the context of the day, rather than the frustration of the moment.

My friend Anna told me a story about her father. He lives next door to a woman who has two kids, who are the same age as mine - 4 and 2. This woman asked my friend's father if he could hear her yelling at her kids during the day. When she said this, she was tired and her shirt was stained with something brown.

Anna's father told her quasi-truthfully, no, he didn't. But he also added, 'I have two children, and as hard as it is to believe, I don't remember these days.”

The woman looked at him hard. 'I will never forget these days,” she said.

I laughed when Anna told me the story. I feel like I am that woman - stained shirt, hard eyes - I don't think it's possible to forget chasing my diaper-clad 2-year-old down the street while he yells, 'Oh, a kitty! I get it! I get it!”

So many well-meaning people have told me the same thing: I will forget all of this. These moments of poop and hysterical crying, slobbery kisses and marker hieroglyphics, they will be replaced with something else. I'm not sure if I believe that. But I see it happen all the time. My mother had eight children and she only vaguely recalls her hysterical screaming when we hid rubber snakes in the dishwater. She claims not to remember the late nights and bone-vibrating exhaustion. Sometimes I think she's lying just to get one more grandchild out of me.

How is it possible to forget the constant stream of toilet-paper wrapped gifts from my daughter, the imaginary baby chickens and all the piggyback rides I give in those last long minutes before bedtime?

I recently read Terry Tempest Williams' book 'Finding Beauty in a Broken World.” She writes about learning to make a mosaic, placing each tile one after another so from afar the picture blends into a masterpiece. Each tile is in community with other tiles. They are, as Williams writes, 'in conversation” with each other. For the artist, hunched over her medium, it is hard to see the bigger picture. For the artist obsessed over each tile, each color, every small shape, it is easy to lose track of what the picture is supposed to be. But for the artist, perspective is necessary because the picture is there.

When you look at a great mosaic, you don't see individual tiles, what you see is a grand masterpiece. But you wouldn't see that if those small shapes weren't there, in conversation and in community with one another to create a vision of light, color and shape.

This is why, perhaps, parents forget the color of these smaller moments. Because as children grow, they see the larger masterpiece of their lives.

I understand this on a smaller level. It's why I recount story after story. This ritual helps me place my moments into the bigger picture of my day. As my days as a parent become years and decades, each of these moments will live in conversation with the larger work of who my children become.

It's painstaking, frustrating, and beautiful work.

' Lyz Lenz is a writer, mother of two and hater of pants. Email her at eclenz@gmail.com or find her writing at LyzLenz.com.