I remember the day as clear as if it were yesterday.
I had decided to do something with her alone, because she had been having a hard time with her sisters. (Sometimes being the middle child is like that)
I remember her shiny bob, and the hood of her coat as we walked together to the park by our house, where we sat in the grass in a secluded area, and we talked about school, and about home – lighthearted, at first – and then the conversation got deeper.
My daughter, Tessa, was only 6 years old then, yet she proved to me that day that she had the mind and abilities of someone much older.
That day in the grass, she told me truths about herself and about me.
She explained some hurts. She shared observations of family dynamics.
I spent the whole time squinting my eyes slightly, trying to figure out just where this wise, insightful little being had come from, suddenly.
At the end of it, though, I knew I had just lived in a moment I would come back to in my mind in the future.
I never saw her the same after seeing her that way.
She had gone from being a child to this whole universe of thoughts and feelings in a Gap Kids jacket.
She regripped my hand, and we walked back home. She picked a dandelion.
She never had any idea how those 30 minutes in the grass had affected me.
I thought she had needed the time, then I realized that I had.
Last night, she came home late from her college classes and handed me a small paper notebook.
Inside was an essay she had just gotten handed back from her professor with a big bold “A” on the cover.
Her college English class has been studying Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning.”
It is the story of how he survived being held during the Holocaust by focusing on three things he believed could get a person through anything:
Focusing on tasks,
loving someone else,
and facing suffering with dignity.
As a writer and lover of humanity, she knew it would delight me to know she was flying through this class and subject.
She stayed standing in front of me with a smile as I carefully read what she had written.
Her ideas were succinct, and her use of vocabulary was impressive, yes, but there again, right in front of me, was the proof to me that she understood so many things of a deep nature.
She wrote about how each of these three things can lead a person to find life’s meaning,
and ended it with a powerful observation that life always holds meaning, actually, but it is up to the individual to discover it.
She smiled at me, waiting for my approval, which I gave to her wholeheartedly.
I then shared one of my own recent writings with her that I was proud of, and she read it as carefully as I had read hers, said, “Wow,” and handed it back to me, before we just sat, admiring one another for a second.
People always talk about how hard it is to move on from the days when you have small children. I know I have often.
It’s hard to see them change right in front of your eyes, abandon their old, beloved toys,
and ask for a bigger kid bedroom.
It feels a little bit like you’re leaving behind your most precious dreams to do things like watch them graduate and pack them up for college,
but I am here to tell you that I have absolutely found that some of the most precious treasures in life are having teenage and adult children.
You always have special moments that stand out in your mind of your small children as you raise them.
That day in the grass is one of mine.
I remember the smell of the air and the temperature.
What you don’t realize, though, as you leave those moments behind, and walk back home over cracking pavement, is how often your older children will escort your spirit right back to them as they grow.
I’ve been back in that grass with her so many times now.
This time, I was holding her paper.
She’s had nearly two decades now of complex thoughts and feelings;
Nearly two decades of angst of being a middle child,
but, she has taken every struggle, thought, and concern, and (just like Frankl) used it to shape a life of depth and feeling.
That “A” I was looking at felt like the universe’s grade for a little girl with a bob who just gets it.
She sees life, and love, the world, and other people;
And, instead of giving up hope on them all,
she is choosing to find meaning.
What a privilege to watch my daughters grow and to see what they are becoming.
I have worked so hard all of my life to try to see them for what they are instead of just what I imagine them to be.
I look at her now, and it’s almost from above.
I still see the grass, and the sparkle in her eyes, and that dandelion that made good on the wishes.
Like it, she has been breathed out into the world,
and watching her go has been nothing short of magic.
Mom Outnumbered
Hi! My name is Kerri Green; Wife to Justin, and mother to four highly entertaining daughters -Alena, Chloe, Tessa, and Paige. I am an artist, a writer, a daycare provider, a lover of people, a believer that there is humor and beauty in all things, and the author of Mom Outnumbered; a blog about real family life, and my observations of it. My goal is to make people laugh, to be there for them when they cry, and most importantly, to let them know that they are not at all alone in this up and down world. I live with my family in Sebastopol California, and I am opening the window into our life. So welcome! Come in. Sit down. Just please don’t mind the mysterious wet spots.
