Slipping Through My Fingers all the Time

I toss a handful of laundry into the basket anchored to my hip by my other arm. I turn, my knee swipes the corner of the dresser, and a big purple can of hairspray topples off the edge and rolls across the floor.

And it’s my hairspray.

When did she start using hairspray?

“What are you doing?” She’s sitting on the floor in front of the big mirror that’s leaned against the corner. She’s holding a basket full of makeup and brushes and hair clips.

“Your laundry.” I tell her. “You’re welcome, by the way.” I nudge the can with my foot. “This is mine.”

“I needed it.” She sort of smiles. She knows I don’t care if she uses it even if I pretend like I do. “Uh…but I guess I need to, like, get some of my own?” She really smiles at me now, both sheepish and cheeky, then she rolls her eyes. I glance at the reflection of her face peering up at me and then she looks away, half amused and half annoyed.

And then I feel it. The first tiny pebble scouting quietly ahead of an avalanche of grief that hasn’t quite collapsed yet; skipping and skittering alone down the surface of my heart. The feeling is striking. But it only seems strange until it turns back on its heel to face me. My breath catches in my chest. The feeling is not a stranger at all.

It is the look on her face,I think, one I’ve never seen her make before. It’s the face of that teenage disdain for her mother’s very existence, buried inside her beneath a swirl of new and ever changing feelings and thoughts, and all the Harry Styles lyrics that she knows by heart. Annoyed by my very presence lingering even briefly too near her own.

It is disarming. I don’t often talk with this feeling or entertain it. I’m not that mom –clinging and desperate for her child’s eternal youth. I’ve barely even noticed how quickly she is growing up, our coexistence so familiar and comfortable that I don’t ever really stop to look back at it, only directly at where we are while we are there.

And I want to see her grow and change; that is, for all the expected reasons which parents admit, and for all the selfish reasons we don’t mention, too. I want to watch how her milestones widen the path we share. Every passing second of every day becomes less and less ours together and more my seconds and her seconds, and sometimes knowing that feels like a big deep breath I’ve been meaning to take. Now I can see that she means to take it, too.

This thought echoes around in my head and I pull in that big breath. I can smell her shampoo, a pricey salon smell, also mine, which doesn’t smell like my baby at all. All at once I remember that uninvited feeling that is hovering nearby. It makes itself known with the terrible sound of the sharp cracking of the foundation of my heart and I slip through.

She should only be five years old, and she should still smell like the no more tears! green apple shampoo that I just bought for her, and like the peanut butter and jelly sandwich that she ate for lunch because little bits of it are still stuck all over her face. Her strawberry colored curls should be wild and untamed and spilling out of the barely-still-there butterfly shaped clips I’d fastened in her hair this morning. Her little knees should have two or three band-aids stuck to them, only one of which she even needs, and the others just there to mark the places where she needed me to kiss all around the spots that hurt.

She and I should be walking hand-in-hand through the grocery store, and to the mailbox, and up the sidewalk to her first day of school.

And when we get there, she hides behind me while I talk to the teacher, her little fingers grip to the inside of my knee. She peeks around at the classroom, curious and petrified by all the other children, in awe of the shelves of colorful paints and markers and the short half-moon shaped tables.

Then it’s time for me to go. I hold her hands. I tell her it’s ok, and that she is so smart and that she will love school. I gently squeeze one hand three times and tell her in a way she and I have always done, each squeeze silently telling the other the words;

Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze.

1-2-3.

I-love-you.

“But Momma, I want you to stay.” she whispers.

“You’re going to have so much fun that I’ll be right back before you know it.”

Then she smiles back at me, faking a bravery that is trying to convince us both. I’m brave Momma, I really am. I run the back of my finger gently along the bottom of her eyelashes, I catch the tears before they spill over onto her cheeks. My eyes meet with hers; green like sage and enormous. You will be. You are.

I stand up to leave and she holds onto my hand. She faces her new world and doesn’t look back at me. She squeezes 1-2-3 times before letting go.

I-love-you.

And now, despite myself, I want to run as fast as I can back to her, snatch her away from there and keep running until it’s just me and that shy little honey-sweet girl. My sweet love. I want to run until I’m back where that too warm, too bright, too beautiful crying baby is lifting her tiny pink hand out from the hospital bassinet, searching.

I can see her out of the side of my tired, heavy eyes, so I lean over the side of my bed. There’s a paper bracelet dangling from my wrist, and all my bones and my muscles and my skin feel sore and tired and torn. That little pink hand clings as tightly as it can to my finger and I take my first breath in this new life where my entire existence has become relevant. She stops crying and she lets out a sigh which whispers into my chest every missing part of a heart that I never realized was never whole before.

Now, I want to run away from this feeling which shows up to remind me of what I don’t want to remember; that she is the very best of everything I have ever been, and, that she’s not mine to keep.

What even was I before her? Pieces, moments, fragments? Right now I don’t remember, only I know I was a work unfinished, now finished by her, for her. Exactly everything she needed, but not just that, all that she wanted, always. Her cry tailored for me to sooth, her falls thrown for me to catch. All of her hugs and her scribbled crayon drawings stuck all over the fridge, and her tears and her sticky peanut butter and jelly kisses; moments that flashed into existence and are gone now, forever.

Suddenly, I know it, in this fleeting moment, I know I’ve been wrong.

All those milestones I’ve longed for don’t widen our path together. They are stones in a path leading her further, further, and further away from me.

And now I’m here, standing in her room, the heart she built for me thudding inside my chest as it puts itself back together, ashamed to have fallen apart. Each of those tiny moments float away from me like ashes flying up from dim glowing embers, fading into wisps of smoke that disappear into the black and starry sky of my memory.

“Is it, like, really even that big of a deal, mom?” Her hand reaches up toward me, just like the day we met. My skin burns to hold it. Instead, she grabs a scrunchy from the dresser and pulls her hair back. “What is hairspray, like, three dollars?” She rolls her eyes again, the origins of what is becoming her new signature move. Then she giggles; still honey-sweet.

I roll my eyes back, mocking her, and pick up the can.

“Do you have three dollars?” I sit it on her dresser and hoist the sliding laundry basket back up onto my hip. “Do you have a job? You can keep this one, just ask before you use my stuff, ok?” I smile at her reflection.

“Ok.” Is all she says, then, an afterthought: “Thanks.”

She barely looks at me again, only down at the open pallet of bright eye shadow on her lap. My gaze doesn’t linger on her, I’m back to work. Picking up laundry, moving around, moving on.

Then I’m out the door, my free hand swinging down by my side. I make it into a fist; empty, irrelevant. Walking alone down the hall I squeeze my fist 1-2-3 times, gently.

I-love-you.