The Last Chapter

bedtime stories and quiet endings

For years, we read together at night before bed.

It started with picture books. The Jesus Storybook Bible. Dr. Seuss. Whatever book had been pulled from the shelf that evening. Sometimes the same one three nights in a row because that was the one they wanted.

Eventually the stories got longer.

We read the Narnia books. A Wrinkle In Time. The Westing Game. The Hobbit. Then all of The Lord of the Rings. Finally we started working our way through The Wingfeather Saga. By then the boys were older, and the routine was changing, but still one more chapter before lights out.

Parenting feels a little like a book you’ve been reading for years. You know you’re getting close to the last chapter of this part of the story – even if you’re not quite ready to turn the page. While we were reading the last book of the series, I had the quiet sense that these nights were numbered. Childhood doesn’t announce when it’s about to move on, but you start to see it coming in small ways. We were only a few chapters away from finishing the final book. It’s still unfinished.

As a parent, you’re constantly doing things for your kids and with your kids. Some of those things feel tedious in the moment. Diapers. Buckling car seats. Bath time every night. Even the good routines can start to feel like obligations. Like a sentence you’re serving until they’re old enough to do it themselves.

When you’re in the middle of those years, the end feels impossibly far away. And then one day you realize something strange. You don’t remember the last time you did it.

The last bath you gave them. The last time you buckled them into a car seat. The last time you walked them into school holding their hand. The last chapter you read out loud.

You never realize it at the time that it’s the last one. If you did, you’d probably slow down. You’d pay closer attention. Instead, those moments just slip quietly into memory. And I regret every time I declined to read because it was already late, or because I was tired, or because insert woefully lacking excuse here.

And if I stop and think too long about things like that – about bedtime reading, or walking them to school – I feel it in my chest. Because the list of “last times” keeps getting longer.

It’s a part of parenting they don’t warn you about, or maybe I just didn’t listen. The strange rhythm of it. Years of repetition, followed by quiet disappearance.

You spend so much time wishing certain phases would pass. And then they do. And you miss them.

Sometimes I see that unfinished Wingfeather book on the shelf and think we should probably finish it. Not because the boys need the ending.

But because I do.