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We leave for a cabin by a lake tomorrow and my daughter has been basically vibrating with excitement for the last week. She’s got a lot to look forward to: she loves a lake, she’s got a good friend staying in the cabin next door, she’s ready to spend long days in her swimsuit, getting brown and sandy. She’s packed her bags and made her snackle box (as she explains it “like a tackle box, but with snacks for me, not the fish”) for the three hour drive north.
And while her excitement is due in good part to the prospect of a week of fun, I also know that part of her anticipatory joy is that… well… I’ll be there.
My daughter has never been in a hurry to grow up. She was content to be a kid, she’s slowly edging into the world of preteen life filled with the “hot goss” about who the newest couples are and some early interest in make up and clothes that is a marked difference from her former aesthetic which was “hand-me-downs from my brother and the same Emory University hoodie everyday”. She’s still in kid land a lot of the time and I am grateful for it. I’m in no rush for this phase to end.
My daughter turned 12 this spring and I’m her favorite person1.
As someone who was an unabashed teacher’s pet and who regularly tried to trick her therapist into confirming that I was, in fact, his favorite client, there is obviously a large part of me that enjoys knowing that I am someone’s clear favorite person (though I worry about it hurting my husband’s feelings sometimes) .
Another part of me finds this stage impossibly bittersweet.
I know I won’t be her favorite forever.
I don’t want to be her favorite forever.
I want her to have big romantic love and to become a parent (if she wants to). If she wants it, I want her know the gobsmacking magic of watching your partner hold your new baby and knowing her capacity for love has expanded to places she can’t imagine at 12. I want her to know the bone deep love of old friends who can hold all her secrets. I want her to have lots of favorites… including me, but not just me.
I’m currently in a writing group where several of the other writers have been sharing vulnerable, wry, angry, and sometimes heartbreaking pieces about figuring out how to feel at home in their own bodies and in the lives that they’ve built for themselves. There is a lot of unlearning of lessons about how to be a woman; mothers are showing up a lot in these early drafts. It makes me want to rage about the terribly cruelty of mothers who sowed the seeds for eating disorders and self-hatred, the ones who told their daughters to lose weight, to be quiet, to not take up space. It reminds me that my worst parenting fears aren’t about toddlers choking on grapes or preschoolers wandering away at the story anymore. My biggest fear is being someone who causes damage that has to be undone later. My fear is being someone who makes my daughter believe that my way of being a woman and a wife and a mother and a boss and a friend is the only way and that she has to mold herself into my image to make me proud.
There is some anticipatory heartbreak in knowing she’ll eventually have to pull away from me to figure out what kind of woman she wants to be, what kind of life she wants to lead.
But there is also comfort in knowing we’re good so far, me and my girl.
My husband held this position for years but has been dethroned, something that is at least 27% due to the fact that I’m the one who took her to the Taylor Swift concert last summer.
What a beautiful poem about your love for your daughter, Wendy! I love your writing and the way you put words together like “vibrating with excitement”. Also, this post made me tear up…
Beautiful poem! Also: snackle box is amazing.