I left work early today to take E to her middle school orientation. It was loud and large and busy and confusing, but eventually we puzzled through her schedule, and found all her classrooms, and found the cafeteria, and worked through her locker combination a couple of times.
Scrolling through Instgram later I discovered that I was supposed to have taken a picture of her opening her locker. No fewer than five other moms had posted one, but somehow taking out my phone to capture the moment never even occurred to me. I wish I had, of course, but missing the mom boat is not new to me. It's just frustrating to know that I could have even done that-- taken a simple photograph, with my daughter and 15,000 hormonal middle schoolers jamming up the hallway. I'd made a pact not to even take my phone out of the car, lest I use it to somehow embarrass her and mark her for life in some miserable, after-school-special way. Turns out she probably wouldn't have even cared.
I don't feel prepared for this next step. I don't feel prepared for the tween she is, the teenager she's about to become. I was barely functioning well in the years when she adoringly agreed to (most) of whatever it was I suggested we do together. Now the sands are almost through the hourglass, and I'm racing to catch the last few precious grains before she's lost to me, down a long corridor of friends and phones and crushes and heartbreak and a thousand, thousand things she'll never tell me. What I will be told will be curated, smoothed, selected. It is my most fervent hope that we can avoid the permanent severing my own mother and I went through, and still endure, but the prospect of anything even remotely like that happening between us quite literally keeps me up at night. You'd think I'd be a walking click-bait article of "Perfect Mom and Daughter Moments to Share With Your Tween," but most days I make it home from work with fumes in my tank. I'm propped up a little by dinner, and can at least listen to her happily chatter. On the weekends I do stand a fighting chance to spend some quality moments with her. I just need to make more of an effort. There's so very little time left.
Last Sunday, she told me she very much wanted to read with me on a blanket in the park, and I roused my exhausted lump of a body because this was not a request to be refused. She took the copy of the Meg, Jo, Amy, and Beth graphic novel that she'd recently purchased, which is based on Little Women. We sat together, under the trees, and she read no less than six chapters to me. Every so often there was a letter from one of the girls to their father, who (in this retelling) was away serving on an unspecified mission in the Middle East, and I read that to her. And she lay on her back and gazed up at me and truly enjoyed the feeling I put into what I was reading (which possibly made me over-emote in acomical way, but she didn't call me out on it).
I related so well to the exhausted mother in the book. I felt damned and condemnend when the girls talked about how much they missed her, and how they wished she didn't work so hard, though in my defense I'm just a full-time librarian, not an ER nurse pulling doubles to keep food on the table. But I was also able to get my head out of my miserable asshole and recognize the absolute joy in Eva's eyes as she shared this book with me, and how she giggled, and how she said several times that she loved being with me and loved reading together like this. What a lucky, lucky mother I am to have had that afternoon.
Middle school is coming-- I can't stop it. May I get out of my own way enough to let such moments between us blossom into whatever they can become. May I even stop being so morabund as to imagine that their time is short, but it might be. I love my girl so much and want us always, always to have a connection-- through these middle school years, and on into her high school years, and on beyond forever. I want it enough that I think I can be sure that no matter what happens between us, I'll be able to say that I tried as hard as I could to keep ahold of this golden thread. To stay conencted to the tiny baby whose picture is in the very first post of this blog, anout 11 years ago. The absolute light of my life.
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