It seems I have a nine-year-old now. How this happened I’m not quite sure -- I’ve been reading old entries about the way she used to insist on sleeping with her little plastic comb or wooden toaster instead of a stuffed animal, about how she’d only been sleeping through the night in her own room for a little while, about the brightly colored bows I was allowed to clip into her hair for an ever-so-brief period of time. These days I’m allowed, sometimes, to tie back her hair in a ponytail, and once this spring she even consented to a French braid. She doesn’t much care what she sleeps with anymore, occasionally rotating through her favorite stuffed animals in a touching display of fairness. She sleeps through the night, thank goodness, unless she’s just faking it, which might actually be true. But she wraps herself in her Star Wars blanket every night and groans when I kiss her “too many times.” Generally she gives me a limit. I sneak extras on her forehead and she rolls her eyes. Tonight, though, after she’d dressed in an old nightgown that used to pass her knees and now hardly reaches them, she walked into the bedroom where I was folding laundry and wrapped her arms around my waist. I hardly have to bend down to hug her anymore. I tipped my head slightly and rested my cheek against her hair, still wet from her bath, and we just stood like that for a long time, our arms wrapped around each other. She didn’t say anything, and I didn’t either, but with every breath I took I was breathing I love you I love you I love you.
She smiled at me and walked back out into the living room, where she curled up with her latest book. She’s finished all of Harry Potter so she’s moved on to Madeleine L’Engle; she blew through A Wrinkle in Time and is nearly finished with A Wind in the Door. For her birthday we bought her the complete set of the Little House on the Prairie books and I might just reread those right along with her, but if I want to get started I’d better grab it now or I’ll have to resort to reading after she’s in bed, worrying that I’ll accidentally dislodge her bookmark, an offense not to be taken lightly.
On our annual Girls’ Day Out over Memorial Weekend, Suzannah’s auntie Morgan asked her what she liked better -- reading or math. Or maybe she asked her what her favorite subject was; I can’t quite remember. Suzannah said she likes doing math best at school but reading best at home, and when asked about her least favorite subject, she scrunched up her face in a frown like it was an absurd question -- she likes it all. People who knew me when I was young make the inevitable comparisons because, yes, I loved school. I still love school, obviously. But even though my daughter seems to have inherited my need to read, she is not me. A friend of mine once wrote about the temptation to see our daughters as idealized versions of ourselves, and it’s true; I think most of us would love to believe our children are the essence of what’s best about us. But that’s also dangerous thinking, and I wonder if that’s why mothers tend to be so rough on their daughters, critical in a way they’re not with their sons. Do we see everything they do as a reflection of us, and what do we do when it doesn’t match what we want to see? Another friend once said she felt so plugged into her daughter’s psyche it was almost scary -- that she felt the pressure to be everything for her daughter, role model, confidante, the very model of womanhood. With her son it was more like, “Free love!” Somehow removed from that same pressure. And it’s a generalization, yes, but sometimes I hear my voice when I’m frustrated and I hate it -- it’s certainly not my idealized version of myself. I catch the way I speak to her when we’re butting heads and I wonder if I speak to my son the same way, and if not, do I tell myself it’s because he’s still so little? This is what drives me to crawl in next to her at bedtime and say, “I’m sorry I was so grumpy.” It’s hard not to qualify my apologies with “but I was frustrated because...” but I think it’s so important. I don’t believe children hear enough apologies like this from adults, certainly not ones that stick to “I’m sorry,” and I can’t expect to teach something I don’t practice myself.
As my daughter grows more and more fully into herself, I remind myself that I love the person she is, not some version of her I imagined before she was even born, when I imagined myself as a mother of a daughter before I actually was the mother of a daughter. And I think most of us must feel this way, when we stop to think about it. Of course we love our children for who they are, even if they’re not the people we expected to meet when we gave birth. In fact, that’s a really beautiful part of parenting, even if it’s not always easy. It’s humbling, for sure. Because it’s not that we don’t love our children unconditionally -- it’s that sometimes I think we fail to communicate that. I love you but. I’m sorry but.
My daughter forgives so easily. When I tuck her in and tell her, “I hope you know every single day of your life how much I love you, even when we have a hard day,” she smiles and pets my hair and says, “Of course I do.” And someday I hope she understands the magnitude of that gift to me. How much she blesses me, all of her, every single day.
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