Roots and Wings.

Precious Child, I wish for you two things;

To give you roots

To give you wings 

Maybe if I write about it, say it out loud, look it square in the face, I can force my heart to accept what my mind already knows: that my first baby, the one who made me a mother, is a baby no longer. In fact, according to a set of rules I don’t recall agreeing to, she is now considered a fully self-governing, signs-her-own-waivers, completes-her-own-medical-forms, voting, tax paying adult (albeit one who doesn’t know how to use our electric can opener and who texts me more often than the Ring doorbell). 

The little girl who has lived the whole of her life beneath the safety of my wings has begun to spread her own; she is perched right at the edge of the nest. I was unprepared for the way that every flap and flutter would beat painfully against my heart, as though the growing pains were mine; much the way her tiny knees and elbows once pushed against my insides as she outgrew the space beneath my ribs and prepared to move to the wider circle of my arms. 

That space feels very empty now. 

We are each more afraid than we can say; the world suddenly feels so impossibly big. For her, this chapter means stepping out alone for the first time in her life; marching to the drumbeat of her own precious heart and defining herself on her own terms, not the ones we’ve written for her. For me, it means that for the first time since I discovered the miracle of her existence -  two blue lines on a test stick, the whooshing and thumping of a separate heartbeat inside my own body - she will go where I cannot follow. 

We have just days before she takes her first steps into a new life, one that I will share in only tangentially. She will reach the end of a journey that began with a few wobbly, barefoot steps across the polished wood floor, my hands hovering inches away, protecting but never touching. Only this time she will walk much farther from me; and I will wait much longer for her to return. And just as I did on that precious day, I will cheer. And I will cry. And I will be right here, just waiting for her to need me. 

After 18 years as the center of her world - its sun - her poles will shift; she has begun to generate her own light. And while the journey ahead is very different for each of us - one looking forward, the other looking back - almost everything we are feeling is some variation of the same thoughts: 

I am so excited. 

I am so proud. 

I am so scared. 

Cayce has never been noticeably like other kids; she’s never been noticeably like anyone else on the planet. As a baby - and then a toddler, a preschooler, a kindergartner - she was so easy; a good sleeper, a good eater, and so smart, alert, and curious, with an almost perpetually sunny and contented disposition, her father and I genuinely couldn’t understand why everyone complained about parenting. Why did everyone make it seem so hard? This wasn’t hard at all. (Seven years later, her brother would come along and answer that question resoundingly, forever dispelling the notion that the ease of parenting our firstborn had anything to do with our skills: “Ohhh…okay. This. This is what they meant.”) 

Some days her babyhood feels tantalizing close; like waking from a vivid dream feeling as though you’re still in it. I remember the softness of her cheeks, like silk under my fingertips. I remember how vulnerable she seemed in those first hours after her birth and how vulnerable and terrified I felt, knowing I was her best shot at safety and security; that it was just me standing between her and the cold, harsh world - a world full of car crashes, germs, mass shooters, flat Earth-ers; people who say “supposably” and laugh at fart jokes.

The happiest hours of my life have been spent holding a sleeping baby against my chest, a velvety soft head tucked under my chin. My hands remember the feel of a tiny, diapered bottom against my palm: pat, pat, pat. Perhaps the hardest part of parenting is realizing that what’s best for our kids is also the thing we dread most: it’s our job to keep them safe - and then later, to train them to leave that safety behind: to not just encourage but insist that they go where we can’t protect them. 

I can’t believe we sign up for this. 

I did not expect to be so delighted by parenting - to find such exceptional joy in the tiniest developments - like teeth. Teeth! Unlike her brother who was still mashing food with his gums at 11 months old, Cayce had her first two teeth at just 4 months. I remember my utter delight and astonishment at discovering those two tiny, pearly little bumps in her gums. I could not have been more excited about striking gold in the Yukon. Everything about her was magical to me. And perhaps I held some magic for her, too, because she certainly was patient with me - this frightened, bumbling woman who loved her so much, and who had no idea what the hell she was doing (and did all of it while relentlessly singing off-key) . 

I agonized over every decision, making all of her baby food myself, worrying absurdly about nuclear war and our proximity to golf courses (all those pesticides and fertilizers!) and feeling absolutely shredded at the look of shock and betrayal on her face during her vaccinations - why was I letting this woman poke her with sharp sticks?! Wasn’t I going to do something?

The night before she went off to Pre-K I called my then mother-in-law in a panic. What if I hadn’t done a good job? What if she wasn’t ready? What if she couldn’t be without me, or I didn’t socialize her enough and she didn’t make friends, or she never adjusted to the routine? What if she failed at school because I was a terrible mother? 

As usual, Pat’s practicality stopped my hysteria in its tracks: 

“Well, they’ve never once told a parent that a 3 year-old wasn’t cut out to go to school and sent them home, so they’re probably not going to start now.” 

While her approach to mothering is very different to mine, when I really needed her, Pat always came in clutch. 

I had to be talked down again when the time came to put her on the bus to kindergarten: 

“You want me to just put her on a bus and just…just send her out into the world? Have you seen how tiny she is??” (Author’s Note: The elementary school was two blocks away - I could practically see it from the front door - and Cayce was riding the bus with her 8 year old cousin* Also, that is not at all how school buses work.)

Just when I’d gotten used to the school bus and the long day away from her, first grade came and I discovered that her classroom didn’t have its own bathrooms and Cayce would have to walk down the hall. It seems silly now to think how that panicked me (I called people - many people - to discuss it), but nothing in life has ever made me as vulnerable, as ridiculous, as hysterical, or as unreasonable as motherhood. I love those children unreasonably.

Next to the joys of holding them while they slept were the hours they rested against my knees, my feet up on the coffee table as I held their tiny hands and sang songs and talked (and talked and talked) to them for hours about everything and nothing - but always as though they could understand. Their smiles - looking right into their eyes as they smiled at me - invoked a feeling of love so fierce it almost felt like pain. The unbridled joy of a baby or toddler when I’d come in to scoop them up from their crib after sleep, little bodies absolutely bouncing and wiggling with excitement - what could ever be better than that? There is simply no joy I have ever known like the joy of my children.

That doesn’t mean it has been easy. 

While Cayce was a ridiculously easy baby, toddler, even kindergartener, everything that has made her amazing as a child and teenager (and will make her dynamic and interesting and great as an adult) has made parenting her through those years…an adventure. At our first conference with the teacher who led the REACH program - what my generation knew as the gifted and talented program - the teacher told me, “In order to have a gifted child, you need to be willing to have a gifted child. Gifted children usually exhibit one, maybe two, of five distinct personality types. The more I work with Cayce, the more I think she has all five.” (While this story does no justice to the delights of knowing and loving Cayce, I feel it says a lot about the experience of parenting her)

But now here we are. She is a smart, wry, wisecracking, absurdly bright adult (legally, anyway) who is also blessedly unsophisticated and distinctively quirky. She is a fox in a room full of schnauzers; a flamingo amongst the barn chickens. She has survived an educational culture where she did not, could not fit in; Daria Morgendorffer in Friday Night Lights (or worse, Varsity Blues). She has weathered her parents divorce and a house fire, learned how to be a friend and how to endure the betrayal of false friends. She has seen her idol not just knocked from his pedestal but crumble before her eyes; a devastation that has broken her heart in ways we’re still uncovering, and the reverberations of which will echo for many years to come. 

And yet. 

She is more confident, more comfortable in her skin, than she’s been in years. Something of the exuberant little girl in the princess dress, the clever, creative child who wrote stories and dreamed big dreams, has returned. It’s that spark that tells me she is ready for this next chapter more than any of the so-called grown up milestones. 

Like most parents of kids at this stage, I look at her some days and marvel at how ready she seems to go out and conquer the world; far more so than I was at her age. Other days I fear I’ve completely failed her; that she needs so much more shaping, so much more teaching, so much more time. 

That’s when I remember that the shaping, the learning, the trying and failing and rising, it is all hers to do alone now. I’m sending her into the world to achieve those things in the only way she can: by doing it herself. I’ve given this project all I had, and now for better or worse, it’s time for pencils down. 

I will always be here, a safe harbor. But ships are not meant to stay in the harbor. It’s time for her to set sail. And as I stand here on shore, waving my handkerchief to the drumbeat of the many worries that plague me - about drugs and drinking and walking alone late at night and whether she knows how to use her online banking app or if she knows what to do if the toilet overflows - I know that none of it matters, because none of it is in my control. There is nothing else I can do, except love her, and answer the 1001 text messages (and pay the bill) and hope that I have given her the only things that truly matter; the only things she can take with her. 

Roots. 

And wings.

*In my defense, I had neither a job nor a home, nor other children to care for, having just uprooted our lives in Florida to move in with my then-in-laws while we rebuilt our lives in New York. Tears were appropriate, for many reasons.