Dear World: This is my girl

It's late, and I just tucked my exhausted children into bed, but I wanted to document this moment, however inadequate my late-night musings may be.

We celebrated my girl's tenth birthday today. Ten! She is ten! How is it possible? How has a decade, which seems like such a weighty, significant length of time, actually passed since her birth on that gray Sunday morning? Then again: she is so deeply anchored in this world, and in our hearts, that trying to remember our lives before her seems like a strange trick of memory.

Dear World: I want you to know some things about my girl. I want you to know how much I love this child. I want the world to love her like I do. Loving someone as much as I love my babies just makes me feel kind of desperate and crazy most of the time. Sometimes I feel like the best I can do is hope and pray that this crazy love will make up for all the ways in which I cannot possibly live up to the task of raising them well enough.

My daughter loves to laugh. She is also obnoxiously funny in that fourth grade way that irritates me now but that I will absolutely miss one day. (Things that are "funny" in our house include terrible puns, terrible knock-knock jokes, and anything including bodily functions. Oh, you thought that was limited to boys? It doesn't help that she has a little brother whose favorite word lately is "booger," but I am here to tell you it's not limited to boys.)

She is friendly. Nothing delights her more than seeing someone she knows. If she recognizes someone from school at the grocery store she insists on running over to say hello. Sometimes on our way home she'll cry, "Mom, I see my friend!" and it will be literally some kid her in class she saw not ten minutes earlier, but she is still so happy to call a cheerful good-bye after that person.

She is kind. One of the best compliments I received was from a staff member at her school who watched her standing up to an older kid who was picking on a younger kid.

She is incredibly stoic at the dentist. I don't know why I find this relevant; maybe as her mama I'm just so proud every time they say, "She's seriously one of our best patients." They probably say that to everyone who doesn't cry, I don't know, but last year Suzannah had to have a filling and it wasn't fun, and the dentist said that while she held it together really well in the chair I might just be prepared for her to be a little shaken or emotional afterwards. And I was like, hey, I majored in being shaken and emotional! I've got this. But Zannah walked to the car, spit casually onto the asphalt before climbing in, and asked if she could really have ice cream for dinner and also could we please hurry home so she could do her homework.

At the same time, she is sensitive to people's feelings. She is sensitive to perceived injustice. She in sensitive to what she perceives as imperfections: she will lose her mind if she thinks she will be late for school, or if she forgets a math assignment in her desk, both of which have happened exactly once this year. The tardiness was out of her control (ahem, Matt) but the math assignment was a simple mistake. Both, I thought, provided opportunities to learn how to deal with life and the pressure to be perfect, and I resisted the powerful urge to try to fix it for her. It was hard on both of us. But it's not the last hard moment we will have: I know this, too.

She loves school, loves learning. She reads greedily. She thinks math is fun and she's proud of being good at it. She tells us that her class is full of weirdos, and she says it proudly. She's not "cool" and she she seems to be unabashedly okay with this, and this is something about her that I love so much; I will do anything to protect that in her. She doesn't engage in drama at school; if it exists, she doesn't appear to notice. Her best friends are the boys in our neighborhood, but lately her "best friend" is a girl at school who she has been "hanging out with a lot lately, like the last two weeks!" (She's actually a lovely girl who's been in her class for years, but lately they've bonded over, I don't even know, math and Harry Potter.) She deeply loves everyone who has ever been her teacher. I can't blame her. I love everyone who has ever been her teacher.

She is bookish and bossy, which she maybe gets from her parents (although I am admittedly the bossier person in our marriage, though Matt is probably equally as opinionated). She also loves sports, and I have no earthly idea where she gets that. Matt and I love to be active, and Matt is all about tossing a frisbee or playing tennis or engaging the kids in hard outdoor play, but neither one of us give the remotest of shits about, say, football, and our child can watch an entire game and be actively engaged the entire time and I have a pretty good feeling she understands it far better than we do. She plays soccer every day at recess and can't wait to tell me about the day's game when I pick her up at the end of the day.

She wants to play the drums. Gulp.

She loves people. If you become one of "her" people, know that it matters. Know that when you see her, and smile, and give her a high five or a hug, it matters. If you know her name, it matters.

So today this girl of mine turned ten.

We celebrated with a trip on the light rail, first to Trophy Cupcakes and then to her very first Mariners game, and she got to spend most of the day with not only her parents and brother but her beloved Uncle Aaron and Aunt Morgan and Grandpa Chuck and Grandma Diane. She seemed to love every moment. Full disclosure: we left the game a little early, as it was a night game and we wanted to avoid the crush of people leaving the stadium. She was disappointed at first, but Isaac was totally done by the time we made it to the light rail; he fell asleep on the way to the transit center. Both kids zonked out as soon as we buckled them into the car and snored the entire way home, and both kids changed robotically into pajamas and collapsed in bed within minutes of pulling into our driveway.

"Was it a good day?" I asked my daughter, curling around her in her bed after I tucked her in.

"Uh huh," she said. She pulled her blanked over her head, like she always does. Then she smiled.

"You can give me some extra kisses, if you like," she said.