Tonight, driving home from IKEA with my mother and my sister-in-law and my beautiful daughter on the eve of her seventh birthday, we reminisced about the time she was born -- about how sick I felt the night I went into labor but refused to admit I was in labor at all (since she was born a month early), about how sick with jaundice she was after she was born, about how overwhelmed and scared I felt. There were other, happier bits in the storytelling too, of course, but tonight I keep thinking about that because of what came next.
“How long was I sick?” she asked.
“You were really sick for about a week,” I said. “Remember those pictures we have where you’re tucked into the bili box right on top of our kitchen counter? We had a nurse come out to our house to check on you every day.”
“But what day was I better?”
“Well, you spent about a week in those blankets,” I told her, “but you looked like a carrot for about three weeks after that.”
She burst into peals of laughter. “A carrot! Mom, that’s the funniest thing I’ve ever heard.”
She was just delighted. A carrot! How absurd!
And suddenly I wished that I could somehow go back in time and give my new-mom self a huge hug. I remember -- and not fondly -- sitting in the brand-new blue glider, rocking my daughter who wouldn’t nurse off my rapidly filling, rock-hard breasts, wondering how I would get her to eat or how I would manage to take a shower. I bathed us both in tears, and every time some well-meaning person reminded me to enjoy every moment I felt a little more of my sanity drain away. Somehow it gives me a little comfort to imagine the mother I am tonight whispering to the mother I was seven years ago, “Someday, your daughter will want to hear every single word of her story.”
(Eventually, of course, we figured it out together. She learned how to nurse, and then eventually it stopped hurting. I learned that we both slept better when I brought her into bed with me. We learned each other’s rhythms. I tried to write it all down, even the messy parts, the hard parts, the parts that didn't go in the pastel-colored baby books. Those were the stories I needed from other mothers, because they made me believe that I could fall fiercely in love with my own, imperfect as it might have seemed at times.)
She’ll be seven years old in the morning. Seven. She’ll have memories of her own, memories of me, of this time in her life, of our family, and I realize that she really is the author of her own story. Not me. It’s a humbling thing, really, to realize our separateness long before she probably will, but I take it seriously. I struggle with how much of her life to share publicly now, because it really is hers. I feel so plugged into her psyche sometimes it terrifies me, even in -- especially in -- our more challenging mother-daughter moments, but at the same time I struggle with projecting myself onto her. One of my friends once wrote about how it’s only natural to see our daughters as idealized versions of ourselves, but that can be dangerous territory. I can see myself in my daughter, but she is not me. Nor do I want her to be. I wish I could put into words what I feel sometimes when I look at her now, when she doesn’t realize I’m just watching -- maybe she’s just brushing her teeth before bed, all long-legged and slim and slightly tan, and she leans over the sink to spit, gathering her hair in one hand and holding it back all by herself so she doesn’t get toothpaste in it. It’s such an ordinary, heartbreaking, wonderful thing, to watch this beautiful girl just be.
I really can’t write her story anymore; I can only write my own. There’s a loss in that, I suppose, but even on her first birthday I wrote that I would never wish her back to babyhood, as much as I ultimately loved it. Watching her become her own beautiful self, whatever I might wish for her -- that is my life’s greatest blessing and my deepest joy.
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