stop growing up so quickly

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Five for Friday: These Exquisite Endless Fleeting Days Edition

Last night was one of those nights: I woke up at two, could not fall back to sleep, and as I drew closer and closer to morning, my brain decided to amp up the anxiety. It went like this: Dinner party stress: I think I will do a Greek salad; I do want to grill the salmon/chicken beforehand, but that means I need to clean the grill today. Probably I should also make hummus today, too, so I can use tomorrow before our guests arrive to panic-clean everything in sight. Birthday party stress: the treasure hunt is still in progress, and I don’t yet know if we’ll have enough kids for teams which affects how I do the treasure hunt. I need to text a neighbor about using his mailbox as a clue location. And oh, since the resolution of the treasure hunt is going to be the big pink flamingo pool floatie, HOW am I going to do that if the kids swim before they treasure hunt? Maybe the kids should do the treasure hunt first, then dinner, then swim? But that means swimming later, and will we bother our neighbors? Upcoming travel stress: Ugh, I do not want to get on an airplane. Will the cat sitter be as good and trustworthy as my friend said she would be? Will the cat be too lonely? My husband will be here with him at night, but he is so used to people. Will he hate me and Carla when we return? Will my husband be lonely? I’ve never left HIM alone this long before, either. Social stress: I have one upcoming week during which I am Carla-free, and I’ve so far planned FOUR meetups with friends, and I want to do all of them, and at least three of them won’t happen this summer otherwise, and yet ACK. Upcoming sleepaway camp stress: Ugh. What will I do without my baby while she’s away? Will she be okay? What if she hates it? What if she gets poison ivy and can’t sleep and is as miserable as she was the first time she got poison ivy, and was more wretched and despondent than I’ve ever seen her? And of course the recent Texas tragedy is playing over and over in my head, God rest the souls of those poor children and soothe the hearts of their parents. What if… Not floods, probably, but fires or bears. How do I teach Carla to evade a bear without terrifying her? IS there a way to evade a bear? She’s so little. Does the summer camp have A Bear Plan? Should I call and ask or will they think I’m crazy? Apocalypse stress: All this flooding feels Biblical in nature. And the wars. And the news. Everything is hopeless. 

That was when I got OUT of bed, because being in bed was no longer going to lead to sleeping. I checked on my child, flopped across the entirety of her bed like a starfish, and stole the cat (also sleeping, also taking up as much bed as possible) (what? there’s no rule against waking sleeping cats), and went and sat in my office trying to hypnotize myself into sleeping via the motorcycle rev of the cat’s purr. 

The cat purred until he fell asleep, slept, and then – as usual – abruptly woke up and decided it was time to play. So I got out my laptop and wrote this post. 

I have been feeling guilty ALL summer about how constricted I feel with Carla around so much. Especially guilty now, as her sleepaway camp nears, and I won’t get to see her at all. I know in my heart that it’s not HER that I’m resisting; it’s the dearth of time alone, that’s all. Spending time with her is, in fact, so precious. Here are five of things I’m loving about our time together. 

  1. Mornings with Girl and Cat: Every morning, I either wake up and feed the cat and then take him up to Carla’s room, where he wakes her up with his purring. Or Carla wakes up first, feeds the cat, and I wake up on my own. Either way, we end up watching cat videos on Instagram for an unplanned amount of time. I hold the phone, she nestles into me, the cat lies somewhere between us, engine rumbling. It’s more comfortable so snuggle up in her bed – there’s more space. But I kind of love the mornings when the three of us gather in the armchair in my office. There’s nowhere near enough room for both of our rear ends in the chair, but Carla squishes herself in, half on top of me, anyway. We have so rarely had morning plans this summer that we take our time. Mostly I try to keep our reel-scrolling to ten or fifteen minutes, but one day we watched for a half hour. We’re in our pajamas. She leans her head against me. Her hair tickles my cheek. Her legs, coltish and long all of a sudden, overlap my own, her feet almost reaching mine.
  2. Car Rides: Now that I’m not driving two hours a day, every day, I’m no longer averse to going places. Carla gets to sit in the front seat now and she loves it. I am surprised by how much I love it, too. She chooses the music we listen to, she makes jokes, I can reach over and squeeze her knee. There’s this very subtle shift that’s happening – I suppose it’s been happening all along, and I only just noticed it – wherein she’s becoming less of a charge I am shuttling about and more of a companion; I’m not ferrying her places, we’re going on adventures together.
  3. Cat Obsession: I am almost embarrassed by how much time the two of us spend observing the cat. He is just so cute, Internet. And Carla and I fully and intensely agree that everything he does is cute, and we want to be informed of everything he is doing so we can take part in the cuteness. The two of us will stand on either side of the cat tower and pet him and comb him and rub his little feet (he loves to have his back feet rubbed and will splay his little toe beans so you can gently rub the webbing between his toes) and admire him and tell him how handsome he is. If he is doing something adorable (most recently he jumped onto my bathroom counter and “hid” in the sink), one of us will call out to the other so we can both bear witness. No one else in the world is as interested in his every whisker twitch as she and I are, not even my husband, and I love that we have this shared obsession. 
  4. Pool Time: Carla seems to have much more fun in the pool when she has a friend over, and I get that. Unless you are a boring adult and enjoy swimming laps, it’s a little lonely to play in the water by yourself. But friends cannot come over every day, and sometimes we just have each other. We play a game we came up with last summer, Water Spa, where one of us is the client and the other is the incompetent spa technician. The client lies down on the pool float and the technician drags her around the pool trying as hard as possible to dislodge her from the float. We practice handstands and Carla gives me tips about how to do mine better. We wave to the kitty, who watches us from the window. I don’t know that I’ve played with Carla all that often since she was a little kid. I was never great at it; I don’t enjoy it. But I’m learning to relish these playful hours in the pool, just the two of us. 
  5. Unexpected Undertakings: During the school year, our time together is fairly structured. Wake ups, breakfast, me cajoling Carla through getting dressed/brushed/out the door, car rides to and from school, me prodding Carla through her weeknight activities or homework, dinnertime, bedtime routine. This summer, with so much free time, we’ve ended up doing things I’d never anticipated. Playing Clue together, then watching the original Clue movie. Watching YouTube videos about how to give a cat a “hygiene cut” and then giving our cat a hygiene cut. Taking videos of the kitten and editing them together for his non-existent Instagram account. The other day, I was working on her treasure hunt and she wandered into my office and perched on the arm of the chair, curious about what I was doing. I didn’t give her a peek at the treasure hunt – she will not get an unfair advantage! – but I did show her my digital folder of birthday things. I’d created a Pool Party Scattergories last summer, in case we had rain and the pool wasn’t part of the party, and she was delighted. We played it together, just the two of us, sitting there on my chair, counting down “Three, two, one” and then saying our answers simultaneously. When the prompt was “things you find the fridge” and the letter was E, we both said “eggplant” at the exact same time and dissolved into giggles. Mundane things made magical.

This summer has reminded me of that feeling so familiar in Carla’s baby and toddler years, of being touched out and overstimulated and unable to have a moment to myself. It has reminded me of that first summer of Covid, when I was Carla’s sole friend, teacher, parent, and entertainment and I was ill-equipped for any of those roles and I felt like it was unfair that she was forced to have me as her mother when she deserved so much better. 

It has also reminded me of how joyful and creative Carla is: She is so full of laughter and singing and buoyant ebullient energy. She and a friend composed a song about potato chips, of all things, and it’s catchy and hilarious. She wrote a story (about the cat) for submission to Story Pirates. She created an absurd exercise routine she does in the pool, narrating herself spoof-gymfluencer style. She constructs elaborate lairs for the kitten out of boxes. She is a delight, still in many ways a little girl while in increasingly numerous ways a young woman, and I have a front row seat to the complexities and contradictions of this stage.

Right now, she wants to be with me. Yesterday, after we’d been looking up Truth or Dare questions for her sleepover (I’m writing them on slips of paper and putting them in a basket), and I needed to go do something, she called after me, “And then when you’re done, we’ll do something together!” As though we hadn’t been doing something together all day long. 

How long will this last? It won’t last forever; it can’t. The point is not to hold her tightly to me, it’s to stay here as she leaves.  

I never learn; I seem destined to repeat this lesson again and again. There is exasperation but there is also an urgency to preserve these moments in amber. The push and pull of parenthood, the resistance to and longing for closeness, the need for separation and the anguish that separation leaves behind.

* * *

We go around the neighborhood together, me on foot, she in her new rollerblades. She’s still a little unsteady, so she holds my hand. It is so hot, as hot as the summer she was born, when I walked endlessly around the block trying to induce labor; sweat trickles down my back, her hand is damp in mine. When the road gets steep, I pull her, even as an ache spreads across my shoulders; on the downhill side, she grips tight to my waist, her arms hot, her weight setting me off balance. 

There are places where the road is flat and smooth, where she lets go and glides ahead of me. So far, there’s always been another tricky spot that causes her to stop, wait for me to catch up, thread her fingers through mine. Any day now, she’ll discover she’s fine on her own. I hope she always reaches for my hand. At the same time, I hope she doesn’t look back. 

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Times I Cried Watching A League of Their Own

Carla and I have been working our way through some of the family movies you suggested. So far, we’ve done Freaky Friday, in which I think Lindsay Lohan is excellent. Bend it Like Beckham which was more relationship-heavy than I remembered (and, dare I say, sort of boring?). Newsies, which has a banging soundtrack, and to which Carla said, “Why aren’t there any girl characters?” (She’s not wrong; by my count, there are four total women in the entire movie.) 

Most recently, we dove into A League of Their Own. I started crying pretty much right away. I don’t recall it being a tearjerker, do you? The tears welled up so often that I started making a list. (Um, mild spoilers if you have somehow not yet seen this absolute masterpiece of a movie.)

  • When Marla’s dad blamed her lack of femininity on himself, because he raised her alone after his wife died
  • When Marla left her dad, who was so supportive of her baseball prowess, but is now all alone
  • When Shirley Baker couldn’t find her name on the list, and then when another player figured out that Shirley couldn’t read and helped her find her name and they all cheered
  • When all the women were so excited to be chosen as members of the All American League
  • When Doris talked about how her boyfriend made her feel less-than because she can play ball
  • When Mae said “they ain’t closing me down”
  • When the Black woman threw a ball to one of the Peaches and nodded to the Peaches in a way that said, “Yes, I know I should be among you and it’s super shitty that I’m not simply because of the color of my skin.”
  • When the stands were full of cheering crowds
  • The first time the Peaches sing Evelyn’s song in the locker room 
  • When the telegram guy comes into the locker room with the telegram for Betty Spaghetti
  • When Dottie sobs with relief that the telegram wasn’t about Bob, and with worry for the potential that the next one might have his name on it
  • When Bob shows up at Dottie’s door and she can’t believe he’s there, in person, alive
  • When Dottie says “Can we just hold each other for the rest of our lives?”
  • When Jimmy gives Dottie the “baseball gets inside you” speech
  • The entire portion of the film devoted to the series when Dottie is up at bat against Kit, and Kit so fiercely wants to win and Dottie is so stoic and unflappable
  • When Dottie drops the ball and Kit’s team wins
  • When Dottie tells Kit the things she won’t miss from baseball and hugs Kit and tells her she loves her
  • When Old Dottie tells Old Marla she lost her husband just that winter
  • When Old Stillwell tells Old Dottie his mom died

I’m pretty teary these days. I always tend to get emotional around Carla’s birthday (although less so the past few years, which I thought was a good trend; maybe “turning ten” feels like such a big deal, it’s bringing up extra stuff?). I cannot believe she’s hitting double digits. I cannot believe I’ve known her for a full decade. I cannot believe she is about to head into her final year of elementary school. She brings me so much joy and fills my life with so much light and love and energy and glitter – literal and metaphorical – and I just want time to slow down. 

Some people try to talk me out of these feelings. It’s good that Carla is growing up. It’s what she should be doing. It’s better than the alternative. And to those people I say: yes. You are right. I am so proud and overwhelmed by happiness that I get to watch this person grow and change and become ever more herself. It is a precious gift and one that I do not take for granted. 

And yet I am unabashedly sentimental about Carla of yesterday. I want to feel unborn Carla kick against my hand pressed to my stomach. I want to cradle fresh-baked-loaf-of-bread Carla in my arms and watch her head loll, milk-drunk, against my shoulder. I want to trail toddler Carla down the sidewalk, stopping as she points out every acorn, every leaf, every ant with wonderment and glee infusing her squeaky toddler voice. I want to watch kindergarten Carla spin in her twirly skirt and second grade Carla slide down a snow-covered slide and fourth grade Carla play her guitar. I want all of these things at once, just as much as I want to see what middle school and high school and college and parent Carla will be like. I can hold both of those things – the joy and nostalgia, the excitement for what is yet to come and the grief for what no longer is – in my heart and I can give myself space to feel it all.

We also watched A League of Their Own on the day we put in an offer on a new house. I could feel it, that this was OUR new house. It has everything we could want – a mudroom! a crafting space! room for so many books! – and more. It’s in a beautiful neighborhood, with kids Carla’s age in houses on either side of the house and across the street (the one thing our wonderful current neighborhood lacks is kids her age). It has walking trails and ponds and a playground. And there are so many dogs, you guys. So many dogs. It’s pretty close to perfect, and we put in a competitive offer, and I had a good feeling we would get it, but then we had to wait. Watching A League of Their Own was as much a way to distract myself as it was exposing Carla to the great films of my youth. So I’m sure at least some of the crying was less about the characters’ situation and more about the opposing forces of wanting something so much while also being deeply afraid of letting go of the wonderful thing I already have. 

Because when we say hello to a new house – a house we want, and love – we have to say goodbye to the wonderful house we live in now.

It’s just a house. But. This house is so inextricably tied up with Carla. With Carla and the rapid passage of time. 

My husband and I decided, here, in this house, that we wanted a baby. I walked from my bathroom down the hall to my husband’s home office and announced I was pregnant. We painted our baby’s room the perfect shade of pale purple and carefully chose art for her walls. We brought baby Carla home to this house. I slept on the floor in front of her crib countless times. I sat with her on the carpet in the living room, pointing out the sliding glass doors to the wonderful goings on in the yard: the squirrels and bunnies frolicking in the grass, the sun moving over the lawn and peeking through the hedges, the leaves of the oak tree shifting overhead. She learned how to walk here, how to ride a bike, how to swing and blow bubbles and do multiplication. This home was our refuge during the lockdown of 2020. It’s housed ten thousand make-believe games, a hundred thousand art projects, countless hours of singing. How can I leave this house when it’s so full of Carla? So full of versions of Carla that exist only in memory and the molecules of these walls?

Letting go – even when it is a good thing, even when it is the way things should be – is so hard for me. Maybe it is hard for you, too. If not, I envy your ability to leap across the gap to the next thing, confident that you will find footing on the other side. 

As always with anything: Things could change, things could fall apart. As it stands now, we close on our new house in July and will likely move in August or September. This will be Carla’s last birthday in this house, the house she’s lived in her entire life. I am so excited. I am so sad. I hold both of these feelings at once in my heart.

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Pearls

Carla is, at this very moment, operating a library in our living room. She has made a circulation desk out of couch cushions and has brought down fabric bins from her room to hold books (we are not thinking about the current location of the original contents of the bins) (*cough cough* her bedroom floor) (nor are we thinking about how much less fun it is to dismantle a library than it is to create one). She has divvied up the books by category, which seem to be: Realistic Fiction, Fiction, Piggy & Gerald, and Non-Fiction. She has rounded up all of my library books, from the real library, to use in her offerings. She has her (my old) laptop on the circulation desk and created a Google doc in which she typed the title of every book on her shelves. She has created personalized “photo” library cards for her critters. And now her stuffed animals are asking her for recommendations and checking things out. I already checked out Anastasia Krupnik and read two chapters out loud to the librarian, who sometimes still sucks her thumb. 

Not sure why one of the patrons is being used as a step stool, but we all do our part to encourage reading I suppose.

Carla is at this wonderful age between Little Kid and Tween. She’s got all these responsibilities and behaviors of a big kid, and yet she still loves playing make believe and she still has that childlike wonder and delight in the world around her that transforms my heart into a big neon sign pulsing behind my ribcage.

The little round thing on the right is the library card scanner; the black lamp illusion box is the book scanner. I’m not sure which cat is checking out Little House in the Big Woods, but I hope they won’t argue about it. Not the line of library users waiting their turn to check out.

She had to accompany me to the grocery store this morning because my husband is at the hospital. Call Week bleh. Big as she is, I am just not ready to leave her at home alone for an extended period of time. (My husband and I left her alone for about 30 minutes once, while we went to pick up takeout, and that seemed both fine and terrifying.) She was initially extremely grumpy about being dragged along to the store. Who can blame her, really. 

Each cat has her own library card.

But almost as soon as we went inside, she became quite cheerful and inquisitive. She wanted to push the cart, which she can (mostly) do now without ramming into displays or other shoppers. She asked me what various things were (kumquats, delicata squash, figs) and pointed with glee at the baby artichokes and requested we buy many, many types of fruit (yes: kiwi, plums, blueberries, mango, grapefruit; no: whole coconut, pie pumpkin). I love being able to say yes to her at the grocery store, and I was able to say yes a lot: to two types of yogurt (yes, child! Ask for ALL the yogurt!), to a pumpkin roll from the bakery, to a package of mini stroopwaffles (to share with her father), to packages of frozen cherries and frozen raspberries. 

There was a brief mishap in the refrigerated case that holds things like Pilsbury bread and cinnamon rolls. We were in the rice/quinoa/grains aisle, and the case was at the end of it, and all of a sudden a bunch of cylinders tumbled to the floor. Carla ran to help, along with multiple grocery store staff members, and informed them cheerfully that it “just collapsed out of nowhere!” (I really hope they saw that she was not anywhere nearby when this happened. It really was one of those moments of invisible chaos.) As we walked past, I saw one staff member holding up a cylinder that had popped open, the uncooked dough bulging out.

Then we got to the meat section and while I was putting ground beef into a baggie, she told me she was going to the fish counter to see if they had any live crabs.

No live crabs today, but they did have a WIDE selection of clams. Carla begged me to get her a clam, and I felt kind of terrible about it but I said no. I don’t like clams and I have no idea how to cook them, let alone a single clam. 

Then she pointed out the oysters.

“Do you think they have pearls in them?” she asked. 

I told her no, I didn’t think so, but it was possible. And she wanted me to ask the person staffing the fish counter if there were pearls inside. I told her that it was impossible for that person to know. The oysters were closed, and would remain so until they were cooked.

“No, mommy,” she said, knowingly. “They open and close like this in the water.” She showed me with her mouth. “It’s how they swim. Someone could look inside and see the pearl.”

Okay, fair. But this particular grocery store staff member was certainly not in the water with these oysters before they were caught. 

“I think you should just ask, Mommy.”

I did not want to ask. So we stood there for a few more moments, discussing the probability of finding a pearl in a grocery store oyster. 

I don’t know why it charmed me so much, but it did. How hopeful she was about the possibility of a pearl! How certain she was that the fish counter staffer would know whether pearls were present. How startlingly knowledgeable she was about bivalves. How willing she was to discuss it with me, and how carefully she constructed her arguments, trying to get me on board. 

I don’t think I’m conveying it all well enough, but my heart was so full. It was such a happy shopping trip, such a fun time we spent together even though we were both doing a chore.  

Sometimes I wish I were an oyster, so that I could wrap a morning like this one in gleaming nacre, protecting and preserving these fleeting moments of childhood like the precious pearls they are.  

And now it’s time for lunch. Carla says she will close up the library and take her lunch break in the Book Nook Cafe, which she, the librarian, also owns and operates. It serves Lunchables.