Scraping mashed potatoes from a bowl, I notice how expertly she loads the dishwasher--plates on the bottom, glasses on the top.
"How graceful this girl is," I think, as she bends to place a saucer in the rack, her burnished curls falling loosely from a single gold barrette.
What happened to the rowdy child who always had a bandage on each knee? Where is the teething baby with strained carrots on her chin? Where is the colicky infant that I rocked for hours long ago?
How did she grow so competent in just one night?
I watch her move deftly between the cupboard and the sink with mixed emotions, knowing time has snatched away the precious child who blew wet kisses in my ear, and handed me a wonderfully independent 17-year-old fully capable of going off to college and succeeding on her own.
Holding onto the memory of a rosy-cheeked toddler whose tiny fingers once wrapped so trustingly around just one of mine, I embrace the lovely woman who clings to me now with one hand and pushes me away with the other.
I wonder if she feels it too--this push-me-pull-me tug-of-war. Sometimes she just can't wait to get away.
"When I'm in college..." she says, leaving the sentence unfinished in order for me to imagine every possible thing she plans to do then that I won't let her do now.
"When I'm grown..."
When she's grown and has children of her own, she won't make any of the mistakes I've made. She'll be a perfect mother, perfect adult, perfect employee. She'll do it all. She'll have it all. It's what I've always wanted for her, but it's hard to let her go.
But sometimes, quite unexpectedly, she tries to snuggle back into the predictable security of our home. I feel her arms again around my neck. I see her walking through her bedroom, smoothing back the bedspread, stroking a bedraggled Teddy bear, touching the tattered wallpaper that's been there all her life.
She knows her little sister has big plans for that room--paint the walls lavender, rearrange the furniture, bring in a daybed of her own, let Big Sis use the trundle on the weekends she comes home.
"Just don't change things 'til I've gone," my oldest daughter pleads because she finally understands how getting things you want can make you cry.
"We won't," I promise, knowing well how painful changes always are.
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| How graceful this girl is! |
