By Molly Flinkman
@molly_flinkman

When I was pregnant with our fourth baby, I put a full veto on any name longer than a single syllable.

“Why?” my husband, Jake, asked after I turned down his favorite name, Bella, for the fourth time.

“This is the last kid,” I told him. “The period at the end of the sentence. When I say all the kids’ names together, it just needs one final beat.” 

We landed on a name for both a girl and a boy, and a few months later, we needed the latter. In the early hours of a sunny, August morning, I held our final punctuation mark in my arms: Jude.

He was the end, but as I see more clearly now, he was also a beginning and a part of the whole middle of things. 

Okay, yes: I think about grammar rules more often than the average person. I like understanding all the various ways you can put a sentence together, and I appreciate the fact that once you know the rules, you gain some license to break them. In The Fault in Our Stars, for instance, author John Green invented a novel that ends in the middle of a sentence. It just stops before it fully resolves.

I think about this sometimes. Is this really how things end? 

I came home from the store the other day and found our double stroller on the curb. Jake was taking advantage of the last warm day in November to get some yard work done, and was finally tired of the space the stroller took up in our shed. We hadn’t used it for over two years, but I still felt sad to see it left there on the side of the road. 

I considered what it looks like to give an inanimate object a proper goodbye, and a memory immediately came back to me from a different unseasonably warm November day. Jake and I had driven our kids—back when there were only three of them—to a local metropark. Sawyer was strapped into his car seat which clicked right into one side of the stroller. Norah held his hand from her seat, and Lily rode a red, vintage bicycle with clunky training wheels ahead. Yellow leaves covered the green grass on either side of us.

We were together that day, and I felt so much happiness in the slowness and simplicity of it all. 

A woman stopped by a few hours later to ask if she could take the stroller. I watched her drive away with it and considered how much faster our life moves now that all the training wheels are gone. The slow strolls are a thing of the past. Everything is faster now. 

My kids love the Elephant and Piggie book, We Are in a Book!, and it took me a while to realize there isn’t an end to this book either. On the first page, Piggie winks to the reader with a thumbs up. Thank you, her word bubble says, and then the actual story starts on the next page. The two pages seem disconnected until the very end, when Elephant and Piggie give a direct plea to the reader to please read the book again. If you heed their request and go back to the beginning, the way Piggie breaks the fourth wall with her opening wink suddenly makes sense. The first page comes after the last. The book technically just goes round and round and round.

A few nights ago, I sat on my kitchen floor with my middle daughter, Norah, and my youngest son—the one with the single-syllable name—and we asked Alexa to play all the songs Jude is learning at preschool. He sang them all and bobbed his head with each beat, and we laughed the kind of laughter that comes when you can’t believe your life is this good. When I watched him bend his knees together and stick his butt in the air along with “Tooty Ta,” I remembered another small moment from the past: our first ever preschool program.

We sat in a circle of chairs in the center of an old church auditorium. Norah was next to me, and Sawyer—newly born at the time—was snug against my chest in the Ergo. Eventually, Lily filed in with the other three-year-olds, wearing a black pumpkin costume made from a paper grocery bag. Her hair was in her signature ringlet pigtails, and she waved a small wave to us before taking her place in the center of the circle. I watched the entire thing in disbelief. How could this be the same kid who had so very recently given up pacifiers and moved into a big-girl-bed? I had never given preschool programs one single ounce of brain space and now—watching Lily sing simple rhymes about Halloween—they were one of my actual favorite things.

Jude will sing in his first preschool program this fall and next year he’ll sing in his last, which will be our last too. Simple rhymes will be replaced with harmonies and there will be no more tiny voices to sing along with Alexa in the kitchen. 

I often look at my life linearly—like the arc of a story. I give each moment or season or situation a beginning, a middle, and an end. We had one kid, then we had two more, then we had the last. Period. We sent each kid to preschool and then after next year, there will be no more preschoolers to send. Period. We strapped each kid into the double stroller and now we go on long bike rides together as a family. Exclamation point!

Of course there is a linear trajectory to all this, but what if there’s more? What if the lines of these stories are really more like constellations—connected moments and memories that stay in our orbit forever? What if the ends of things aren’t really ends? 

Each moment becomes a memory, sure—tucked away and remembered periodically throughout the span of our lives—but they aren’t useless there in the past. They can still work together for our good; they can still teach us and change us for the better if we let them. All the moments we’ve lived can continue to push us toward gratitude no matter what they contain.

So when it comes to the end of things, maybe that’s not the exact right way to think about it. 

When our first baby, Lily, was born, everything was new and novel. We had no frame of reference for how long any one difficulty or season would last. Then came Norah, and things felt easier the second time around. We had the memories of the first time around to guide us and the welcomed hope that this too shall pass when it came to sleepless nights and the general uncertainty of it all. By the time Sawyer came around, the girls were talking and learning and changing at a rapid rate, so the familiar meshed together with the new in ways that weren’t always distinguishable. 

It was all connected—of course it always is. 

I hadn’t considered all this yet when it was time for the last kid, so

Molly Flinkman is a freelance writer from central Iowa where she lives with her husband, Jake, and their four kids. A lover of houseplants, neutral colors, and good books, she loves to write about how her faith intersects the very ordinary aspects of her life and hopes her words will encourage and support other women along the way. You can connect with Molly on Instagram or through her monthly newsletter, Twenty Somethings.

Photo by Jennifer Floyd.