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I backed up against the wall, placed my heels next to the baseboard and flattened the curve of my back against the surface. I held the pencil as straight as I could manage, eraser at the very crown of my head, lead point like an arrow aimed at the wall. I held my breath, careful to keep the pencil horizontal, scratched a mark and moved away. How very satisfying it was to see the space between the present mark and the past mark! Even as a five-foot-two-inch fifth-grader, I loved to grow.

We are born to grow. There's something exhilarating about getting a driver's license, learning to navigate a new city after a move, sharing thoughts in a book club, mastering Outlook on the computer, completing an entire dinner with side dishes and getting it on the table—hot. Growing is good.

And yet, as a mom, growth is hard to track. In the mornings, I purpose to be kinder and gentler. By noon I'm still the "me" that isn't really either. I decide to invest in my friendships and then think up reasons why I can't possibly meet a friend for lunch. I pick up a book and put it back on my nightstand after digesting only a single paragraph. I want to grow, but I find myself straining upwards with no visible results for my effort.

Frustrated with my apparent lack of growth, at times I've turned to measuring myself by the growth of my children. My life seems boringly the same. Their progress? So much more rewarding! Shopping for the next year of school, my son jumps two sizes in jeans. Wow! Ordering me back from the doorway of her bedroom, my preschool-aged daughter announces, "I don't need you to lift me down anymore, Mom. I'm too big for that." Amazing. How utterly satisfying it has been to transition a child from car seat to passenger seat to driver's seat.

But once children move beyond the growth-chart stage, their growth becomes more difficult to measure. Their progress becomes less linear and more intrinsic.

A while back my young adult son moved out and went to college. I measured: Plus 5! The first semester his grades dipped. I measured: Negative 4. The second semester, he pulled up his grades (somewhat): Plus 2! Then he moved home and began to take classes from a local school: Plus 3. Then he decided to take a break.

I jumped to the conclusion that nothing was happening. Failure. Disappointment. Off track. In holding up my measuring tape to my son's apparent lack of growth, I've learned to re-examine my own. Perhaps the total pattern matters more than the isolated incident. The net gain. It's what you get when you add up all the ups and downs and still come out with something more than zero.

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