“I miss stroller walks,” I thought one day while pulling my youngest in his wagon around a Fort Ben trail while his older brother zipped ahead on his bike.
Walking has been significant to me since I entered motherhood. Once the weather starts getting nice, I am itching to enjoy some of my favorite paved trails around town.
My oldest son was born just a few weeks before the pandemic hit in 2020. While I was afraid to go almost anywhere with my newborn during those scary times, I did allow myself to stay sane by strapping him into the stroller and going for long walks around our old Lawrence neighborhood every day, weather permitting, that spring. I’d cross the street and wave from a socially distant vantage point at my neighbors, sometimes the only human contact I’d have outside my house each day. I would call my sister and talk for an hour on speakerphone while taking different paths every day to check out the flowers blooming in my neighborhood and the signs the kids were putting in their windows for people to look for on their walks. Those walks were so, so crucial for my mental health during those months.
My second son was born three years later in the summer. We had moved houses and neighborhoods. So, when my oldest started preschool at the end of July, I enjoyed every last morning of my remaining maternity leave, packing up the stroller and heading somewhere different around the city to walk while he napped. I enjoyed my iced coffee, the new Post Malone album, and caught up on all the podcasts I had missed over the last several years of motherhood. They were truly the most magical mornings, and I think of them fondly (and often).
Last summer, he had just turned one and still loved being in the stroller. He loved finding dogs on our walks, laughing at a squirrel that crossed our path, and happily eating Goldfish while he got escorted around the trail in his stroller throne.
But this summer is the point at which my leisurely stroller walks have abruptly ended.
He now hates being confined to a stroller. Now my toddler is squirming in the wagon, mad that I put the safety strap on, upset that the sun is in his eyes, but also hates the wagon shade and any hat I try to give him to put on. He wants a variety of snacks, really a whole smorgasbord at his disposal at any given time. He also often feels the need to dictate which direction the walk should take, sometimes to the point of just directing us straight back to the car.
He doesn’t really want to walk long distances on our walks, yet either. He would miss double-fisting snacks if he were focused on the actual walking part of a nature walk, and would also miss his vantage point of seeing dogs approaching both ahead and behind us before anyone else does.
But I see his older brother ahead on the trail, riding his bike with training wheels.
Next summer, those training wheels might be off, and he might be flying ahead out of sight of us, and his little brother may be trying to keep up on a new bike while I try to keep up with them both.
Soon after that, I might ditch my own walking altogether to ride my bike with them to keep up. And not long after that, they will probably be too embarrassed to be seen in public with their mom at all, and I may be back on these trails all by myself.
And that’s when I think – there will be a time, much too shortly, that I will probably miss these wagon walks I’m having this summer.
