The words have hung inside me since you casually said them the other day.
You, smiling over your shoulder at me, pleased.
Me, struck in the gut by the realization of the weight of what you had just said.
Things land differently on a mother’s than they do on other people’s skin.
You were talking about your birthday, the gifts you’d like, where you’d like to eat,
but my ears reverberated with the sound of what you had uttered.
“This will be the last birthday of my childhood! On my next one I’ll be 18!”
They really aren’t lying when they say it all passes in a breath.
Somehow the nights that once felt endless, spent up begging you to sleep, or stroking your fevered head flew away when I wasn’t looking, and left me sitting on a couch in the dark,
staring at the back of a door, waiting for you to walk back in.
“The one with the eyes,” you’ve always been called.
I remember the first time I looked in them, and how they almost scared me with the way they looked back at me, as if I was seeing a you from the future, almost.
Sometimes I think parts of us loop back, and show up with something important to say, like time doesn’t exist.
You were not an easy baby, and you were a highly anxious kid,
but somewhere along the way your feet have grown more sure, and your shoulders have grown taller. Like your name means, you have bloomed beautifully.
You no longer reach up to nervously clutch my hand.
My mind sees you still as a little girl obsessed with your Sleeping Beauty dress.
I can still feel the resistance of your rounded tummy as I pulled it on and turned you around to fasten it.
You would descend the staircase, expecting “Ooh”s and “Ahh”s from anyone there to witness it, and you were never left waiting for them.
You thought we were admiring that pink sparkly dress,
but that look in our eyes of adoration is the look that comes when a people get everything they’ve ever wanted, after years of hoping and praying.
We were looking at Our Prayers Answered in a dress.
But now the time is fleeting, you’ve reminded me.
Your own separate life is right up ahead.
I suddenly feel like I’m the one in the princess dress, racing against the clock, to make it back home in time before my coach turns into a pumpkin once again.
The memories of you girls when you were little sustain me;
Like I’ll always have that one good night,
even if I’m back to just doing chores in the ash again.
How could that handful of summers and birthdays and Christmases be it?
I want just one more bedtime spent kneeling beside your bed, staying that way until my body ached, and all the monsters left.
I want just one more bath time, making sure the soap stayed out of your squinting eyes, begging you to hold still. The fluffy towel, the lotion…I’d comb your beautiful hair and blow it dry, and just breathe it all in.
I want to be the Tooth Fairy.
I’d even take one more panic attack, sneaking across your floor, hoping not to wake you, holding a dollar I’d sprayed with hairspray and sprinkled with iridescent glitter that I had purchased just for that.
I want to search one more time for Spirit, your most special lovie of all: The three inch tall stuffed parrot you wailed you had lost weekly, while I wondered why you couldn’t have fallen in love with something bigger, and a little more easy to spot.
I’ve realized as time has marched on that one of the hardest things for us moms to understand is that we wish to speed through those hard, nothingness feeling days while we’re in them,
but then,
one night when our child is suddenly seventeen,
we will wish we had every single moment back again.
You’d be surprised by what you miss.
The dirty sippies underneath the bed, the Barbies strewn around, wearing no clothes,
all your missing makeup, every lesson that you tried so hard to teach, but that seemed to take so long to sink in…
I wish I could hold both of my own shoulders from about 15 years ago.
I would look deep into my tired eyes, and say,
“Yes. I promise you. You’ll miss even this.”
I know that tonight as you blow out your candles,
your wish will include long car rides out to the ocean with your windows down, and music blaring.
I know you will dream of first kisses, and concerts that steal your voice from all the screaming.
You will wish for moving out to a place all your own in some big city, with giant windows full of plants, where the sunlight is always streaming;
A life of leather and perfume,
just the way your head smelled as a baby.
I always said, “Just like Macy’s.”
I know because I was you once,
and I had those same dreams.
I remember the excitement for the freedom I saw coming, and all the world had to offer a hopeful, bright-eyed me.
But just know that tonight, when I carry you something sweet with seventeen candles ablaze,
while you are busy dreaming of all that is in front of you, I am looking back in time, and seeing the face of a little princess, with missing teeth.
I’m watching you descend that stair case once again from behind,
only this time, I know you’ll just keep going.
You won’t stop to see who’s looking.
Just know I am seeing the baby girl I will always want, the one who makes my heart sing.
Just know I see deep in your eyes to all the past and present versions of you when you are standing there, on the edge of everything.
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.
