They really do grow up so fast

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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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First Day of Fourth Grade

Carla woke up the first day of school before my alarm went off and came bouncing into my room, all dressed. “Wake up! Wake up! It’s almost 6:30!” she called cheerily. I was a bit blearier than that, but her enthusiasm lifted me out of bed. She ate breakfast while overseeing the creation of the “First Day of Fourth Grade” sign; I did the colors wrong at first, so had to redo it. Please imagine me very fondly rolling my eyes. 

We discussed her outfit: a pink sweater over black cutoffs. I told her I really liked the outfit, but wanted to let her know that some kids would be dressy for the first day. Would she prefer to wear something dressier? No, she did not. She wanted to express her “style,” she explained. Plus, she didn’t want to give everyone the impression that she was going to wear skirts and dresses every day. She’d worn a lot of dresses last year, and remembered that one day she wore something else to school and that her classmates expressed shock that she was not in a dress. She wanted to avoid a repeat of this type of incident. 

Did you dress up for the first day of school? My mom took me school shopping every summer: a special trip to the Big City to go to the Big Mall and stock up on new clothes and shoes. I remember LOVING those shopping trips, and feeling very excited about and proud of my new array of school clothes.

Honestly, I loved everything about starting a new school year. Brand-new school supplies, with fresh notebooks full of unblemished paper. New binders – or Trapper Keepers – that were slightly stiff when you opened them. Pencils with sharp, clean points and plump pink erasers. New shoes, free of scuff marks. New classrooms, bright and cheery, and desks that have nothing in them. So many things to look forward to! I am so glad that Carla is feeling that happy anticipatory joy this year. 

I cannot believe she is in fourth grade already. Fourth! Grade! Do you remember when she was brand new? Well, probably not because I was a terrible blogger at that time. But I remember it quite clearly, and it was only five minutes ago! And now she is NINE and in FOURTH GRADE.

My memory is not one of my strong points, and much of my childhood is a foggy mass dotted with blurry snapshots. But I remember big chunks of fourth grade. My teacher was wonderful – she had all these great ways of engaging us in learning – including this semester-long quest that I am sure was accompanied by lesson plans but just seemed, at the time, like a big, long exciting game. She read aloud to us from fun books. She arranged a class field trip into the badlands where we got to dig for dinosaur bones. 

I remember the boy I had a crush on in fourth grade. I remember one classmate took a family trip to Japan, which was kind of unheard of back then, at least in my small hometown, and brought back a ton of exotic snacks that we all got to try. I remember sleepovers with school friends. It was a great year. I hope Carla’s year is just as memorable.

Carla was all ready for school a full 45 minutes before we needed to leave, so we settled in to read the book I am reading to her (Where the Red Fern Grows, which I have never read before). 

We took her photo in the rain and I dropped her off. She skipped into school without a backward glance. Really, could there be a better way to begin a new school year? 

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THREE

When I look back at photos of Carla at age three months, or six months, or ten months, or twelve months or eighteen or twenty-four or ANY of the months preceding this one, I feel such a painful longing for Carla of the past that it is almost hard to bear.

But the way I feel about RIGHT NOW is so intense that I know Future Me is going to have a very rough time looking back at photos of Today.

It feels like being in love, I think. Like, I can’t stand to not be with her. When she’s asleep, I miss her. (That DOES happen, if infrequently.) When I’m in a room with her, I’m often staring at her with a goopy lovesick expression splashed all over my face; if I were in a cartoon, my eyes would be replaced by big red hearts.

My husband – less demonstrative than I am, much MUCH less verbally effusive – feels similarly. I can see it on his face. We kiss her good night before we adjourn to bed and spend a few minutes just looking at her, tucking a tendril of curl behind her ear, smoothing a finger over the soft cheek.

“I can’t believe we MADE her!” I say to my husband, awash in wonderment, like it just happened yesterday. (I mean EW, but I do say that, and I do feel wonderment and awe.)

Three (or, to be accurate, the tail end of Two) is magical.

Carla says “eventually” and “actually” correctly in a sentence, and the earnestness with which she pops these qualifiers into her speech makes me laugh almost every time.

She loves puzzles, running, singing, making lemon soup and other delicacies in her play kitchen, any and all TV, swinging, dancing, hopping on one foot, sliding, hitting her T-ball in the backyard, reading, jumping on and over and across things, cutting play-doh with (play) scissors, swimming, watching tennis, and pretty much anything active.

More than anything in the world, she loves dogs. Big dogs, small dogs, soft dogs, wiry dogs. Dogs hanging out of car windows, dogs walking down the sidewalk, dogs getting their hair cut at PetSmart, dogs lounging on lawns. All of them.

It was surprising, then, the other morning when – after asking to watch a kitty cat video on my phone – she said with such heartfelt longing if we could “bring a cat into my house so I can hug it and snuggle it.” I’ll tell you what, I almost went right out and got her a cat, despite my severe allergies.

She has strong opinions about everything, from what she likes and doesn’t like to eat to where someone should sit to what she should wear to school. One day, we had a long discussion about whether our friend Jack’s name was really “Jack” (my vote) or “Jax” (her vote, and the ultimate ruling). When I told her that in fact Jack’s name was actually “John” and not “Jack” at all, it really blew her mind.

A current obsession is counting things. Whenever you ask Carla how many of something (strawberries, blocks, crayons, blueberries, cheese crackers, minutes until bedtime) she’d like, she says, without hesitation, “Five.” She counts anything that can be counted, from bites of pancake to windowpanes to the caps in Caps for Sale. With some skipping of or confusion with fifteen and sixteen, she can count all the way to thirty.

Fruit remains a staple in her diet, with blueberries topping the list of favorites. Strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries follow, but apricots, peaches, oranges, bananas, kiwi, plums, and nectarines are not far behind. She does NOT like melon. (Fine by me. Melon is an abomination.) She loves pancakes and french toast sticks for breakfast. For veggies, she loves pickles and capers, occasional carrots. Green beans and broccoli top her list of dinner-veggies, and she will even eat them raw (frozen). Peas and corn, sometimes. Same with yams. Fish sticks, tacos, pizza, meatballs, and chicken nuggets are usually eaten and enjoyed. PBJ sandwiches are a good anytime food, same with raw ham and cheese crackers (Cheez Its). She still eats yogurt and applesauce daily (although not as much yogurt as I’d like her to).

I think her favorite food of all is chips. Or maybe ice cream. She is confident ordering both: the former in our local Mexican restaurant, only very rarely with guacamole; the latter anywhere ice cream is sold, even at the previously-mentioned Mexican establishment. Her long-time go-to has been vanilla ice cream with sprinkles (jimmies), but lately she has been asking for rainbow ice cream.

She requested very specifically a vanilla cake with blueberries and vanilla frosting for her birthday. But ask her what she wants for her birthday dinner, and she responds, “Dinner? For my birthday?” as though the concept doesn’t compute.

Her favorite conversation topic of late is a thorough recounting of what happened during the day. “Tell me about your day, Daddy,” she will ask at dinner, and then when he pauses in a sentence, she turns to me: “Tell me about your day, Mommy.” She particularly likes us to tell her about special days – like the time we went to the zoo and saw not only a person dressed up like a cookie, but then ran into some family friends and went on to spend a lovely afternoon together.

More often than not, I am “Mom” and her father is “Dad,” which I am trying to resist. I still wish I was “Mama.”

She is at that stage where she expresses her love freely and loudly: “I just love you so much, Daddy!” she’ll crow, throwing her arms around him.

She still has a few baby words left: mixing up “lemon” and “melon” (which results in the delightful “waterlemon”) and saying “am-ih-lo” instead of “animal” (although “squir-lahs” are now clearly “squirrels.”) and calling “yellow” “lellow.” She has recently taken to calling her grandfather’s slippers “bumpers” (because of the anti-skid bumps on the bottom). I often say to her, “I love you more than all the stars in the sky” and her responses crack me up. Once, she said, “I love you more than all the pants on the ground.” “I think you mean plants?” “No, I mean pants.”

The other day, we were playing in the yard. We have an enormous tree back there – so big it would crush our house to smithereens should it decide to tip over – and Carla decided she was going to climb it. She managed to get maybe a foot off the ground and kind of hung there. “I think it’s too tall for me to climb, Mommy,” she called back. Cheerfully resigned, she dropped down and commenced running in circles, laughing with joy.

She has the most magnificent dandelion puff of blonde curls. I think it’s the perfect reflection of her personality. Beautiful, light as air, untamable, gleeful, fun.

I cannot wait to see what she does next.