Monsters Inc. Ever seen it? I have watched it 5 or 6 times now, and I am ready to consider it my favorite animated film. Although funny and full of action, that’s not the reason I seem to watch it over and over. The other night, I sat through the second half of it again for one reason—to see the last 10 minutes of it, through which I hysterically bawl every time. When I first saw the movie, Twyla was about 18 months old and reminded me of “Boo,” the little girl who befriends the monster she calls “Kitty.” So I feel a particular affection for this little character and how Kitty, a.k.a., Sully, comes to adore her. However, it is the ending of the movie that really grabs my heart and squeezes out my mommy mushiness. It begins the moment that Billy Crystal’s one-eyed character, Mike, says good-bye to Boo as they send her safely back to her bedroom. All he says is five simple yet powerful words: “Go ahead, go grow up.”
It’s impossible for me to fully articulate what those words mean to me and why I become an instant, ridiculous fountain. But, I can say that they seem to represent the fundamentals of what I’ve loved most about being a mom. I marvel at how my children have developed, through my help, from infants to toddlers to my oldest being a preschooler next fall. How excited I am to watch my daughters grow into young women! So much to do with them and so much look forward to! At the same time, the simple statement evokes a profound bittersweet longing for, as the old saying goes, “If they could only stay little.” I sit and cry through the end of the movie for all that’s so sweet and precious about my girls right now that will not stay. No matter how much we wish we could hold onto that innocence, they will grow up and no longer be children some day. That’s life, and it’s wonderful, but at the same time, it hurts when you are a mom. I so deeply love touching and kissing their soft baby skin, playing with their curls, breathing them in as I hold them close, listening to them learn and practice new words, watching their faces as they see or do something for the first time, laughing at their cute habits, comforting them when they get scared, and listening to them squeal with excitement and laugh hard. This is what I experience with them everyday, but I can’t always stop and reflect about how much it means to me. Fortunately, this movie reminds me of what I treasure and how brutal it is to accept that toddlerhood is temporary. If only I could bottle certain moments that should last forever—ones too good to be fleeting, ones too beautiful to simply become memories. That way I could always keep a small part of them just as they are now.
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