Excerpt from It. Goes. So. Fast. by Mary Louise Kelly, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Excerpt
It. Goes. So. Fast.

These days I count the weeks. Before, it was months. Soon it will be days.

I'm counting the time left before my oldest child leaves home. The time left that the four of us will live together, under this roof, intact as a family. The time left—let's just come out and say it—for me to make a different choice.

This child, whose name is James, loves soccer. Always has. There's a photo of him, age one—one!—tiny soccer ball at his feet and huge grin on his face. Barely able to walk and already learning to dribble. Now fast-forward sixteen years. He's a starting striker on his high school varsity team. He lives for these games. This is a boy so catastrophically, irredeemably messy that even his younger brother, also a teenager, gets grossed out by the chaos. This same boy clears a space in the debris to carefully lay out his uniform the night before a game. Cleats, shin guards, cherished jersey, number 7, all washed and arranged at right angles at the foot of his bed. Game time arrives and the whistle blows and James plays his heart out.

At least, this is what I am told. Varsity games tend to happen on weekdays, around four p.m. Want to know what else happens on weekdays at four p.m.? NPR's All Things Considered goes on air. Technology makes possible many once impossible things, but our broadcast engineers have yet to figure out how I might anchor a daily national news program from the bleachers. And so I miss his games. Nearly every one of them. James is actually, mostly, okay with this. His dad attends every game he can; the other parents cheer James on; he comes home and gives me the play-by-play at dinner. I am ... not so okay with this, but I console myself with the knowledge that there will always be another game. That next time I'll figure out a way to be there, deadlines be damned, screaming myself hoarse on the sidelines.

Except that the years slip by. Ninth grade slides into tenth slides into eleventh. Suddenly, James is a senior. I'm out of next times. There are no more do-overs.

I swear there are a million well-meaning books about the juggle and work-life balance and leaning in and leaning out and how you can have it all just maybe not all at once. Start reading, though, and you'll find they're nearly all aimed at young parents at the beginning of the whole enterprise. Tome after tome of encouragement and advice for new moms drowning in hormones and guilt in their office cubicles, because their phones have lit up with a picture from day care or the nanny, of their kid happily eating his first banana. And they're missing it and it's only a damn banana but they'll never get that moment back. Sister, I've been there.

But here is the thing I did not know: the tug is just as strong when your baby is seventeen as when he is seven weeks or seven months. For me, it is in fact stronger. You blink and the finish line is in sight. Young parents, listen to me: It. Goes. So. Fast.

Most of the working mothers I know have made a pact with themselves. When the job and the kids collide, the kids come first. I have pushed back from the anchor chair in Studio 31, NPR's main studio, in the middle of a live broadcast and announced to my cohost and to the startled director, "I've got to go." One cannot get away with this often. But when a text rolls in from the babysitter and it begins, "We're in the emergency room ... ," you stand up, and you run.

Another moment: Iraq, 2009. I'm in Baghdad, part of the Pentagon press pool covering a visit by the U.S. secretary of defense. We're all suited up in body armor and helmets, and we're being herded toward Black Hawk helicopters that will fly us to the next press conference, when my cell phone rings. It's the school nurse back in Washington. She wants to tell me that my son—the other one, Alexander, then four years old—is sick. Really sick. How fast can I get there? "The day after tomorrow" would have been the accurate response, but the line mercifully went dead before I had to deliver it. I cried myself to sleep that night in Baghdad. Not long after, I quit my job.

Excerpted from It. Goes. So. Fast. by Mary Louise Kelly. Published by Henry Holt & Company. Copyright © 2023 by Mary Louise Kelly. All rights reserved.