In our house March 2019 was a month of endings. I quit my job. My son quit hockey, deciding not to move up to the next level, and after nine years, my daughter quit Irish dancing.

None of these things were my dream. Not the job, not spending hours driving to sit in the cold and watch my son risk his gorgeous face, not walking behind a float carrying her coat while my daughter kicked and danced and smiled in a parade. I thought I’d be glad when we were done with these activities, and in some ways I am. The first Sunday that no one had a rehearsal, a performance, a game, or some unfinished work to do we had three meals together as a family. But in some ways, I’m sad. I feel the same wistfulness at hearing that the local bread store is closing. When the kids were little stopping by the bread store for a piece of cinnamon bread was a treat. When my daughter was in preschool, my son and I would go there and wait, he would have a slice of bread and watch the trains from the kid-size chair. I would sit on a high stool nearby and drink my coffee and read the paper, relishing the ability to be with him but also be alone. On sunny days sometimes the three of us would go to the library, then go and eat our gooey treat and then go the nearby park. Once, when she was in third or fourth grade we sat on the benches outside eating and my daughter stretched her arms up to the newly warm spring sky and knowingly exclaimed, “This is the life.”

Oh, it was. Of course, this is what makes me sad, not the loss of the over-priced bread, not the loss of the hockey odor permeating my house, not the loss of spending most of February and March with a jig beating in my head. It is the loss of “the life.” The loss of yet another stage of childhood. The loss of days spent running in the park, watching trains and eating sweet, gooey bread.  The loss of days spent watching my son skate, watching my daughter dance.

We all know the stereotype. The stage mom, the sports dad, the parent desperate to relive their glory days, or their never-were days, through a child. They yell from the sidelines, forcing their child to practice, urging their child to keep going, ignoring their child’s wishes. They never let their child quit. None of us think we are them. But then they say they want to quit and for just a minute we try to talk them out of it and we wonder whose life we are living.

Parents live two lives at once, our own and our children’s. Despite our wishes, despite our intentions, we measure our lives in strange ways: the game we almost won, the goal we finally scored, the step we practiced, when we got to wear the dress, when we got a team jacket, a wig. “What are you doing this weekend?” “Oh, we have a game.” “Do you want to …” “No, I can’t I have to take someone to a practice somewhere.” Before you know it, there you are a hockey mom, a dance mom, a baseball mom and then you’re not. Then you are what you’ve always been, a person looking for her own next thing, her next step, maybe even her next dream. As we move past each stage the time to figure it all out seems shorter.

My daughter has made her next dream clear. She wants to be an actor. In the past month she has finished up one show, auditioned for three more, and started rehearsals for the one she was cast in. This dream has the potential to break both our hearts over and over again. But we’ll keep going. My son’s next step is unclear. Since he started t-ball in kindergarten he’s been on at least one team a year, every year and now suddenly, he is, like me, looking for something new.

Maybe next week or next month one of us will find something new to do. Or maybe, we’ll just find a new place to sit and watch the trains. The next stage is coming and all we can do is wait and see what it brings.