“You’re so brave!” I said, hugging you, smelling sunscreen in your hair. “I would have been too scared to ride that roller coaster.”
“I think those things are just better with friends, you know?” you said. Then stopped, checking my reaction. My sensitive girl, already aware enough to know those words might cut.
“Definitely.” I smiled. You smiled back, relieved that I “got” it.
Soon you won’t think that I “get” anything.
Soon I will lose you, my girl. I’ll lose you to best friends and boyfriends, to smartphones and school dances, to gossip and body issues and tampons and closed doors. To this inevitable business of becoming a more complex version of yourself. I know this. It’s part of this whole parenting deal, and it’s OK. I want you to taste every divine drop of life, and I don’t ever want you to feel guilty about moving on from this mad intimacy we’ve wrapped ourselves in since you grew in me…the wet-whispered secrets and imagined worlds, the easy-fitting limbs that find each other in sleep, the familiar hugeness of us.
It will shift. We can’t stop it.
This summer you are nine, and here we are at this heart-stopping halfway mark. Halfway done with the traditional raising of you. Yes, you will always be mine. We will never be done. But what we will be is irrevocably different – and soon. There is so much I want to tell you, but I know, in my rational spaces, that these are all truths you either already know or will need to discover for yourself. So as you stand before me now all long legs and ungendered chest, wild hair and soulful eyes, I know can’t tell you to wait. I can’t tell you to slow down.
And it’s not fair to tell you how I fear for you – you specifically – more than your brother or sister. How I fear your fire, your intensity, your raw vulnerability, your thirst. That so I’m anxious for those years when I won’t know the tender folds of your heart as intimately as I do now. How I fret and I fret.
You are the child. I am mother. I won’t worry you with my own snapping heartstrings, and I won’t saddle you with the weight of time, which doesn’t yet register in your wide-open world. We will talk, about many giant things. But not this.
What I will tell you is: I believe in you, endlessly. And you! You take my breath away.