My daughter is 12 today. My Lovebug, Stinkbug, Bugabooga. I always feel a little melancholy on her birthday, looking back at how she's changed over the years, how she's grown. The time gets longer, the changes more dramatic.
I have never been more in love with anyone than I was with that child the minute she was born. It wasn't an easy birth either. She wasn't ready to be born and fought it for 52 hours. It was exhausting and at one point I was ready to agree with her and postpone it, if only to get a few hours of sleep. Sleep now, have baby another day. And then there she was - this miraculous, wondrous, tiny little creature. I would have cried had there been any amount of moisture left in my body with which to create a tear or two. She cried for both of us, although she really meant it as a complaint at being pushed out into the brightness of the outside world.
I couldn't get enough of her. When we were home, I placed her gently in her crib, with the chosen Winnie the Pooh blankets to soften her slumber. That lasted all of two minutes. I couldn't stand to have her in another room, away from me. It might as well have been another planet, that distance from her bedroom to the living room. So out she came, back into my arms, only so I could look at her for hours at a time. I was completely and utterly smitten.
It's not like I have grown less in love with her as she's grown. It's more like my love has had to accommodate itself to fit the person she is becoming. She's a lot like me, which has its good and bad points. I find that the things that I don't like in myself I abhor in her. Our likenesses cause us to clash, much in the way that like ends of a magnet will repel each other. Sometimes the pod is too close for the comfort of the two peas trying to exist in it.
I thought she would never learn to walk, which was actually okay with me at the time. When she did start standing and walking, she would never just fall on her bottom when she started to topple. No, my stubborn little child would fight to hold on until the very end, keeping her back straight so that she always landed flat and on the back of her head. I didn't want to be one of those moms that always ran to their crying child. She's a girl and I'm very conscious of the feeling that she needs to be tougher than a little teardrop to make it in the world. So she cried the first few times, figured out that wouldn't get her anywhere, and then got up and started over again.
Some of these lessons have backfired as she now fights to the end for everything with me. She has gotten to be quite adept at negotiating. This must work bette