Little white house, and a room.

My mother died here.

Well, not really. In actuality she died in the converted front room, the one she decorated exactly as she wanted, waiting months for the right wallpaper, with the blue carpet installed just so and the gilded mirrors. The front room of a white house, changed from a room with illusions of grandeur, to one swallowed by the detritus of cancer. She died on a hospital bed, in our front room, early one morning. They threaded her heartbeat on the way to the hospital, her body forced open by machines so we could say our goodbyes stiffly a few hours later.

I had already said my frightened goodbyes as I stepped off the stairs that morning, allowing my father to run down the stairs, failing to stop the inevitable.

She had come home to die after all.

We had spent so much time here-weeks when she was admitted, teetering on the edge, that pale dark ridge to her eyes, the one I recognize even now in those so very sick with cancer, the almost. They might be listening to the whispers of the other side, the taunting of a mystery almost solved, the pleasure of existence without the pain. My mother had been that person for so very long that I adjusted and it no longer scared me-it shook me with the reminder that she was still alive.

After school, after work, my brother would drive my father and I to the hospital to sit with her through her meagre dinner, her ensure or jello. I’d sit in the backseat, sometimes doing homework, often just staring at the familiar trees down the 401 and my father and brother did whatever they could to not talk about the reason for our drive. That our mother and wife was dying, and we could do nothing.

“Tell her about school. Let her know what you did today-say something for Christ’s sake. Talk.”

I don’t know if my mother missed me. I imagine that she did-as I mother, I cannot grasp the idea of days lost to disease, to lying in bed, your family shattered and quiet when they arrive. She wanted to be interested, but what’s spelling and purple congratulatory dinosaurs when there’s a silent rot in your neck and they won’t be able to get it and that remission? We were wrong.

We were wrong. That Christmas? That was your last Christmas.

I’d show her my homework and smile. I don’t remember the last time she touched me.

I remember instead, walking in the old stone downtown of this tiny city, her hand and mine together as we rushed across the street, her lips tight and her purse close. Or the soft warmth of her hips against my head as I leaned close in the kitchen. The curve of her body beside me, lazy Saturday’s on the brown couch, watching Hitchcock, her arms securing me to her. 

I remember what that house meant to her, how each inch was full of her, what she wanted, and the love my father built into drawing her world out for all of us. Somehow, the sunlight always warmed the rooms she walked through, the snow only framing her dreams.

But I remember more that room, above the tips of that tree, where they threw the switch, and a gaping swirling drain opening beneath me and sucked and swallowed and sapped memory and love and strength. Leaving us empty, a body on a bed, three people staring at one another in shock and blindness.

Memory is meaningless with no one left to share it.

The white house, tucked between two driveways, creaking old wooden floors, because any other white house, void of her, memory left at that hospital, with the priests who wept through her last rites, priests who were more friend than spirit, who loved her as we did. They couldn’t bring her back into that little house, shunt her memory to us for sweet tea relief.

Bereft, the house bent itself and wept. She had come home to die after all.

This Old Man

 

My father walks past the kitchen table where the girls grind plasticine into the crevices. He sits next to Vivian, mutters “Watch this.” and in minutes, holds a man, old, time stitched into his face, bemused. His thumbs glide effortlessly across the clay, pulling life and being where there had been a lump once, a person, a story, moment in time created, given breath.

He sticks it to the windowsill where the sun shines on our hands while we do the dishes, leaving him to watch the girls while he’s gone for the summer. I find a tiny baby bottle from one of the girls toys, and I cram it in his mouth, grinning. I start counting the days it will take for Dad to bark “Who the hell put that there!”, irritating him while knowing he won’t dare take it down, amused in spite of himself.

He put it there in April, this old man. It’s August and we haven’t touched him, the only contact from spiders mindlessly spinning around his head. I stare into space one humid day, sweat between my eyes, and suddenly there’s a wooden sailor on my mind.

The last, the only thing my father holds of his father. A slight, wooden figure, widdled one day, absently by his own father, painted to be a toy for my father as a young boy. The paint it falling off now, the tiny corn cob pipe, hanging on an angle from the jaunty grin on his face, above the white white beard.

I can see it so clearly in my father’s wrinkled, always grease in the crease hands, cradled, value beyond anything I can give or make, the visceral link to then, to his never-never years, to a father dead and gone some 40 years. Where the paint falls off and the minuscule knife marks lay, I watch his fingers trace, grasp that long lost pen knife in his hand, feel his father’s warmth, the scent of the scotch he loved to much, the wetness of his speech in his ear.

I look at this old man, orange and sitting on my sill, and I have my father with me, his fingerprints, his aura, HIM, in front of me, preserved. Such a small, almost invisible thing I hold, this part of him, that part of a man I never met, my grandfather, he who I know nothing about, save he was an alcoholic and good for nothing.

But if it was really nothing, my father wouldn’t grasp that little sailor so tightly, or in a an old man’s world of giving up possessions, know where it sits always.

Years past, my father sacrificed his future for his family, turning down a full scholarship to art school when his mother contracted TB and couldn’t work. So he went to work, much as he father had, his desire to be an artist, to let his fingers sing songs in oils and the clay of the earth melt into the ground as he did what he had to, what was right, responsible. He let that dream die, perhaps the same one his father held before the bottle held sway.

But there are days when the sailor man appears in my father, and his hands run away with the brush, or the pencil, or the clay, and another man appears. The man who walked another path, who followed his heart and his dreams and let loose is version of heaven. His fingerprints, they live on my windowsill, merged with his father’s. A dream, of another place, of different people, of who they could have been, who we can be.

Myth of the Manic Artist

A little girl with a little curl sits in the middle of her little bed. She writes and she writes, she rages, she cries. She takes things to make the sky the color of a warm fuzzy peach, and stays up for days, the pen trailing neon through the night.

The little girl with the curl would then collapse, spent and sad, moving little, sluggish from the bed, her muse, her voice stolen, locked in her wrists! How dare they steal her song!

The little girl shied away from the doctors, from the talkers, from the big people who looked down and knew her for what she was. She ran from them, even as she hurt, her song more important, the beauty they would steal, it was MORE important! It’s technicolor loveliness so achingly perfect.

Then something happened. The little girl hit a wall, and the colors left. Her world, baring a few hours, a day here and there, dribbled down to greys and blacks, muted landscapes about her. That world narrowed, constricted, wrapped around her. The words stopped. They weren’t easy anymore. They weren’t there.

Then, the bad time. When it all turned black and the words turned against her and walked echoing through her head, accusingly. The ghost in her eyes very nearly came true. The ghost who stole her words.

The world compressed, and seized, wrapped her in it’s hands and throttled.  She glared back, the little curl refusing this last gift to it, this little girl. The black world receded, pouting, recoiling from the gift in her hands, the light brought to the darkness.

The little girl with the little curl climbed back up on that bed, pen in hand, to work, to find her voice. She smiles there.

***********************

Nothing irritates me more than the cult of the myth of the manic artist. Nothing, not even people more concerned with purses than the news or the overabundance of olives at sub shops.

I recently had this conversation with a friend, or rather, I had a snarky monologue prepared.  Any talents I had, or have, were never because of my manic depression. They have never been a gift of my perspective.

This is the line many people will sell you-that Kurt Cobain wouldn’t have had the same voice without whatever was supposedly wrong in his head, Van Gogh wouldn’t have been so brilliant. We would have lost so much.

Which always makes me wonder-do artists have an unknown debt to society no one has told me about anyway?

Perhaps being sick in my head makes me more willing to speak about it, more willing to sit and look at my condition, at everyone’s condition. But it’s never made me more talented-if anything, since I am NOT blessed with extended periods of mania, it’s taken any talents I may have and widdled them down to nearly nothing. Only now, medicated, do I begin to approach a place of clear and pure creativity I never once came near before, even during the one longish manic period I hit. My writing has never been enhanced by my crazy. Not once.

I’ve run into people who wish they were bipolar, that then they would write/sing/paint/etc better, that they would suddenly have some oracle into another world. But it’s not the case. There is nothing magical about this crazy, nothing that will enhance who and what you write for, or sing for. There’s a cold empty in it’s place, devoid of energy.

10 years ago I would have just assumed I had nothing left to say. Before that, I would have said I was writing brilliantly. Looking back, I was writing total crap. I just thought it was brilliant.

But should the tradeoff be my brilliance for my stability, if my madness was linked to my creativity? Should I toss my lithium down the river in the hopes that 2 half started novels might suddenly jump into life? Should I sacrifice my life for my muse, for any muse? What price life?

When we spend lives hiding who we are, the thought that we’re only valid when acting as something supersonic, this perfect being who spouts eloquence and beauty, don’t we become just another cliche? Don’t we become less than human then, shoved to the corner as another ideal that someone likes to keep in play?

I am not an ideal.

Split the Night

In my dream we’re sitting in the belly of a plane, 6 or 8 random folk, seated, playing games, reading, sleeping, doing what passengers are willing themselves to occupy their time with. I look around, clouded, stunned really. The plane is moving-the slow languid roll of a waiting aircraft.

I know none of these people, but suddenly, they’ve stood up to speak with one another, an excited murmur smothers the windows and I stand myself, lowering my book to the seat as I crane my neck, out of place, concerned.

“Are you ready to DIE!” a woman standing on a small carry on screeches, her lovely navy suit aflutter as her excitement builds. “We are all about to die!”

The group surges to her, ecstatic, their eyes on heaven, or their pain, somewhere else entirely. I swallow panic and run to the nearest door, clawing at the handle, muttering through tears “I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die!” as hands begin to wrap around my wrists.

I wake up as the plane is smashing into a wall of old trees, about to erupt in dark flame. The ache of loss takes all morning to dissipate.

********************************************

As I grow older, more at ease with living, with life, with the idea of having dreams and plans and wants, I realize there is one constant thing I want and will likely never have.

I want home.

My own home was stolen, ripped away by cancer, and neighbours and a grief so unspoken it seeped into the old wooden beams that held the house up. I left, I fled it seems somedays, the pain no match for the familiar quality, the sponge like safety of the place you grew up. Some growing is too fast and painful, shin splints of the soul.

I have a home, a solid, red brick built in 1957 which feels older and is subject to the many fond remembrances of some cabbies in the area. Inside it, my family lives, breaths, dirties the floor yet again, laughs. They fill the rooms with their being, their growth, their voices and sweat. But it’s not that I crave.

I crave the idea of home-the place you can return to. The small town which holds half your family, the aunts and uncles and cousins who know you, who just get you in that uncomplicated family way which frustrates for it’s stagnant nature. I want to confused family Christmas, swings in the yard, beers around the BBQ.

It’s fictive, I know. I spend my time wishing for the impossible, the improbable. It’s like a craving I’ll never satisfy, this want for people who know me, people I don’t have to explain to, who just know that I like no tomatoes on my chicken burger or hate people who use the phrase “those people”.

I want people, I want to have my people, but I never will. There just isn’t enough of them, and they aren’t here and most are unseen going on 20 years. I stare into my future with dreams and hopes and I wonder just how empty it’s going to be, my people estranged, distant or dead.

Is there a point to any of it, without  tribe to follow you?

********************************

I walk around all day, trying to shake from my head the terror of knowing you’re going to die when it’s absolutely unavoidable and unwanted. The novelty of the sensation, not a fear of death, but one more of waiting, of unreadiness, or needing to find my place and home here-it was new. 

I don’t want to die, and want what so many have-a family, a people to surround me and know me.

Such melancholy thoughts, these which tell me I get better still.

2 weeks, give or take.

I crawl from a sweaty bed, head pounding with the forecast of rain, stumble down the stairs, all arms and robe, trying to find a direction that makes sense.

Thus spoke Vivian.

Non stop. Until bedtime. Even a little past bedtime, her nightly visit around 1am, sure to be followed by one around 6am. The constant nattering, the “Hey Mom!” MOM! MOOOOOOMMMMMM!” that echoes in the house and my brain. My eyes begin to dart frantically around, searching for that small soft spot of silence which I believe I left someone around November 2002.

I love my darling daughter, but lord! The girl needs to learn to shut her mouth once in awhile. Constantly yapping and being naturally clumsy got in her way today, with a few bounces off shopping carts, freezers and people. All the while the little trill that is her voice singing through.

When she was a baby I’d stare wistfully at her, wondering what she dreamt about, what she was thinking. Now I know, minute to minute, and frankly, most of the time it’s not all that interesting. Or, it’s full of questions I have trouble condensing for an overly bright 6 year old, stuff like why tornadoes will never come here or why cold hurts when it goes up your nose.

Vivian, you’re sweet like key lime pie and smart like a whip. But you’re exhausting your mother. More reading, less talking.

*************

My second born on the other hand, has been irritable, moody and just generally not very much fun to be around. She climbs into bed each morning with me, looking for a snuggle, but when it’s close to 80F in the bedroom, the last thing I want next to me is something small, sticky and smelly which will stick to me. It’s all I can do to not push her off the bed, and instead I must bribe her-there’s new yoghurt in the fridge! Your sister is on the computer, here’s your chance to watch Treehouse!

She won’t eat and then complains that her belly hurts. She’ll eat, but only what SHE wants, which turns on a dime and could turn into a fake crying fit, something she’s learned from an unwanted source we’re now trying to rid from our life. She’s clearly growing, and slightly terrified, and we’re all growing a little weary of the entire routine.

I think she’s also looking quite forward to Vivian returning to school. Having her here has cut into her own playtime.

Of course, peanut butter makes everything better. I have no idea what we’ll do for her school lunches.

She’s smart, she’s wily, she’s gorgeous, and she’s driving me insane.

Frankly, they both are. I’ve been humming “It’s the most wonderful time of the year!” and rushing Vivian into picking out a first day outfit and all that, my loss of someone to give a shit that I had new shoes for the first day meaning I obsess just a little over her having new things, even if it’s just for that one day. It means something to me, her having a “new” outfit, not a new to her one, and she rolls her eyes and says “Yes, fine” because she really doesn’t care but she loves her Mommy and she does it for me, as I finger the fabric of her bubble skirt, or whatever it is, and wonder what I wore for the first day of Grade One.

Come October, we register Rosalyn for Kindergarten and I’m excited and terrified and more than a little sad that we’re already here. On one hand it’s great-being able to trust them to pour their cereal and milk, to trust Ros to find her channel for TV or Vivian to color so well with her markers. But I thought it would go slower. I thought time would hang in the wind for me, just for me.

Of course, time hangs when it’s 98C with the humidity and everyone in the house is snaky and bitchy and rather smelly. I’ve had to keep the girls away from each other since apparently, sibling torment is an itch one just HAS to scratch. I watch the nostrils flare and the chins jut out and silently groan. It’s gonna be one wild ride.

Sister

Originally uploaded by thordora

There’s just something about sisters.

I don’t really have one. I mean, I have one, technically, if blood is a technicality that counts. I know she’s around and she’s made it clear that I’m the bad guy and well, what can you do? I know who I look like and who looks like me and who matters. Who really matters.

But we aren’t sisters in the regular way. I look at my girls and I see this shared life they’re both attached to, fingers and hair wrapped around each other, inexorably part of each other’s lives. I see the way that they ebb and flow around each other, one’s whining voice cresting in the tired eyes being rubbed in another corner. I see the way they look at each other, with devotion, with love, and occasionally ire, and imagine 20 years from now, their lives full with each other, even while they bicker and they fight.

I’m asked often if they’re twins, as we walk down the road, as we wait in a line, and I smirk about Irish twins and hold my hands on their heads and let their warmth sink through my fingers like a hot potato on a winter night. They fill my days and heart, and their future fills my eyes.

Without me, they will be each other, a contained unit to lean against until the end of days. I step back to watch.

Every little thing is magic

When I was 6, I ran the alleys behind my house like a race-constantly stretching the boundaries of where I wanted to go, and where my mother didn’t want me to be. But it was a small town, and a different place 25 years ago, or so they tell me, and I hung out behind the hardware store, collecting stray nails, or under the fire escape for the apartments over the Seaway Restaurant, the Chinese place we never ate since my mother was horribly allergic to MSG and would PUFF up like magic if it crossed her lips.

I had kingdoms in the bushes, worlds in the skies. Dogs to pet, mud puddles to ruin my socks in. Adults were these giants in my eyes, perfect, omnipotent, occasionally possessing of cookies. Adults were the people we would be, the people with the keys and the ability to do anything they wanted. They could eat all the cocoa puffs if they liked.

They could also break our hearts and destroy us if they wanted, siphoning off our innocence until nothing was left but a paranoid shell.

Lucky me, I found one of those.

***************************

Our backyard is an incredible lush place, the type of place I would have adored as a child-full of corners and mysterious rotting things, color and life. One could imagine the wild things living here, wrapped in a warm blanket of green life and yellow magic. Despite the relative po’folk nature of our house, it’s the surroundings that bring me peace, especially in the summer when you can feel the buzzing of life crawling, creeping, when you eat a wild, sun warmed strawberry or raspberry. When you watch a beaver and it’s young teaching it how to live or a small snake awakens to your voice.

It’s a marvelous place, and I love it dearly.

 

We discovered last week that an old man has taken up residence in these woods, just to the right of us, a little down the trail. It surprised me, and at first I figured it was just a couple of older kids making a clubhouse. But it wasn’t.

My first reaction to this wasn’t friendly. It was paranoid and angry-paranoid at who or what he could be, and angry that now, I don’t dare let my children out as far, since he is the first person they run to.

I rarely trust people in my life. Trusting strangers is nearly impossible. We called the police.

A few days later, he’s still there, and asking me if he can use the old wood from the pool teardown we’ve never gotten rid off. I tell him yes, provided he steers clear of the kids. I ask him if he owns that property. He claims he does. I walk away, my attitude clearly communicating I want nothing to do with him.

Something inside me dies a little more, more than what was killed in an old man’s bedroom 25 odd years ago. The want to trust-the desire to trust-it’s not there. I see my daughters and I see this man and a roaring starts in my ears and it’s all I can do to not secretly run into his hidey hole and burn everything to the ground.

I know that if I had no children, I’d be glad to chat, to learn from him. I cannot take that chance with my daughters, however slight the possibility for harm is. I cannot harm their magic or beauty. I cannot. I will not.

Has anything or anyone tested your limits like this? I’m at a loss-mama bear has risen, but she knows not how to attack..

Wandering? Who’s wandering?

So there’s this lady see….she makes this awesome soap. And she moved near me. Or at least closer than 3 provinces away.

One fine day there was a craft show, and I said HEY! YOU! and she rolled her eyes and snorted and said FINE…I suppose.

And she rolled into town. And she brought some of this:

 

And yes Virginia, is smells even BETTER than it looks.

Finally, I got to smell EVERY bar of soap. Multiple times in fact. While I have often drank beer at my neighbourhood brewery, I had never drank beer while sniffing and naming soap. Nor have I ever had to convince someone to make the sale even if the packaging was missing.

The fair was fun.  Watching people’s eyes light up as they smelled cinnamon, clove, sugar, almonds-watching Jen speak with such passion and authority on something I always dismissed-soap! and come to understand why she loved to do this-because we should all treat our bodies to natural, good smelling and feeling products.

It was pretty awesome.

Sitting and drinking beer with someone you feel immediately comfortable with, enough so that cutting them off multiple times, drunk or sober, doesn’t make you feel bad….it’s a nice feeling. Meeting someone from my online world and confirming she’s not a psycho, but just another woman trying to make it, trying to keep her brain alive, trying to keep her passion moving forward….it’s nice.

My belief in her product is firm-my belief that we’ve started the basis for a firm friendship, well, that’s more based on the fact that she wasn’t even tempted to sell my house to the crazy lady who called.

I think.

(anyway, this is all a roundabout way to remind you to go order!!! Creative Wanderings really does smell and feel even better than it looks. And it’s orangutan approved!)

We did not change as we grew older; we just became more clearly ourselves.

A little while ago last year, I tried to kill myself.

I came a lot closer than anticipated.

I didn’t feel the fear then. At the time, I remember feeling Dali-esq, ice in my veins. Detached from everyone and everything in my life and world. I remember wanting so desperately to be heard and noticed.

I didn’t really want to die. I just wanted to stop feeling how I had been feeling. I just wanted something to change.

I can remember how shiny and “real” everything felt, how slowly the air seemed to move around me. How the air smelled like cupcakes. I started wavering in and out of consciousness, and the nurses started yelling at me to stay awake, stay there. It was so cold in that room.

My hand held charcoal as they repeated how close to destroying my body I had been. An hour more, 30 minutes more spent lying in bed deciding…I could have lost my liver, and yes, my life.

They were kind, and gentle at a time that I needed someone to not judge, not wound me. When I awoke, violently ill a few hours later, they held my hair and told me I’d be ok.

This is hard to write somehow.

*****

This last year has been one of the most difficult of my life. Last summer was awful, I lost my job, I’ve had to take a paycut and a job well under my abilities. I lost my ability to see and believe that life, and those of us in it, are good people. I’ve been forced to grow, forced to challenge who I am.

I’ve been forced to face the fact that I didn’t die at 30, and that life continues beyond it.

I’ve begun to form a picture of where I want to go, who I want to be. All those things most of you started at 19 or so, dreaming of the world you wanted to create. I stood, stagnant inside myself for years, unwilling, unable to look forward, terrified to be honest, of believing that tomorrow could come. I can now sleep knowing that tomorrow doesn’t necessarily mean the end.

I’d like to say I’m happy this all happened. In some ways I am. In many ways, having my own shit shovelled down my throat was exactly what I needed. But it’s come at a cost and that cost has been pain-how I have ached with loneliness and fear this year, set free to float into my future. Now I can look ahead and I’m frightened of where I might go, tormented by the desire to set foot into that ocean and the terror of doing so.

The terror of finding what I really want.

I’m not healed. I’m not perfect. I still have my days where the color of the clouds makes me cry into my pillow until 4am while my husband patiently waits for it to vent itself. I still have days where my anger could menace entire communities, gorge itself on small people and cars. I still have times where I doubt myself, and greatly, wondering how in the hell I got here anyway.

But I’m not dead. I am not dead, and I’m getting through this summer in ways I couldn’t the past two years. I’m not dead and I’m stronger than I thought I could be. Scared, lonely somedays, as I find my footing, but very much alive, here and now.

*******

On the gurney, my head lolling to the side as the drugs I had taken sank deeper into me, I muddled an apology to the nurse trying to place my IV, so sorry for taking her time away from all the other people who really needed her help.

“It’s ok.  We’ve all been there honey. Lie back, and let us take care of you.”

 

Thank you, all of you, for being here this year. I’ve relied on your wisdom and humour more than you’ll ever know.

We shall find peace. We shall hear the angels, we shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds.

I fuss and fight and feel strained about my life and a headache forms, righthere to the left of my eye and throbs to pull my brain through with it. I hide from the sun as it makes the pain worse and my stomach it aches too and hours pass and I think “I’m cranky, when did I last eat?” and I realize a bag of chips in 12 hours does not a dinner make and my feet hurt to distract me from the waste of a heart hurt.

Then this:

The air stops around us as we sit in the diamond shined grass next to the house, and I lounge there with cats surrounding and Rosalyn on my lap, watching Vivian hunting for insects, creatures, fairies, telling Rosalyn that no, grasshoppers are not carnivores.

I think to weeks back, walking home late night with my husband, dark through a wooden trail and seeing, for the first time ever, fireflies with my own eyes and the awe that filled my chest.

He stared at me with laughing eyes, disbelieving I had never seen, amused at my delight. Such simple, lavish delights.

It’s much to easy to get annoyed at not writing, at not having my dreams in the palm of my hand right.this.second, simple to sigh and slump in my chair, twirling hair in my fingers. It’s the simple route to forget the joys in front of me, these that my mother must have craved, sitting in her lap late summer evenings, listening to the sounds of the world around us.

So I laid back, grass in my hair, children upon me, a heap of arms and legs and bugs and cats. Looked up into the fading blue and thought,

yes.

and later, Vivian held wonder in her hands for the first time and I thought back to the first night I held stars like that, and I smiled.

Six

Vivian, look at yourself.

About 6 years ago, I had no idea what I was getting into. I was nervous, asking all of those idiotic first time mom questions. (Will it hurt? Oh course. How will I know it’s time? You will. Hoooo doggie you will.)

I dreamt of you. One night I dreamed your name was Vivian and we spoke of magical mundane things and you held my hand as we crossed the street. You were six, well spoken, witty and amazing.

Oh darling, how marvelous it is to have a dream come true.

You read. You read stories to me. We read The Magic Shop and you stop me every paragraph or so, whispering,

“This part is mine Mommy.”

and without a hitch, you read. Sure, your tongue tangles here and there, and you might tilt your head up for help breaking a word down, but dammit girl, you are reading, and well. I watch worlds well and expand in your eyes, and I become the mother I saw in that dream.

You inspire me my little.

You are so very much the antithesis of me. You are bright, and bubbly and charming. You believe the best in everything and everyone, and I am loathe to nudge you, even a little, from this path. I do anyway, because it’s my job to protect that beaming smile and lanky body. You are an optimist, but a realist too. My explanations settle in you, your mind quieted by reasons.

You make me believe that people can truly do anything. I have never believed that for myself, not really, but watching you, seeing your hands deftly find their way with army men, grasshoppers or the garden hose, I realize that you may save a life someday. Create life. Build statues. Build love.

I am struck dumb so often by you, by this person I am raising, this woman I help to create. A girl so far unconcerned that she isn’t as “girly” as the others at school, a girl happy to grub in the dirt, dreaming of planes. You have your own drummer, and I revel in this, hoping it never disappears.

I have my dreams for you, but boiled down, simplified, they are this: Be Happy. As a baby you smiled up at me, a gummy grin, and I was engulfed at that moment, finally, months in, feeling my love for you. Overwhelmingly I thought

‘Let her always be this happy, regardless the cost. Just let her be this happy.”

So far, we seem to be doing ok.

I miss my smiling baby, my giggling toddler, my pensive little preschooler. But she’s being replaced by this incredible little woman, with her own dreams, her own wants and needs, and I couldn’t be happier. She’s growing into herself.

And it is fantastic.

Happy Birthday my girl.