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May 05, 2005

today my daughter is sixteen

Sixteen years ago today my daughter was born. It was a difficult pregnancy and there were a few times we thought we might lose her. She has ever been a resilient soul, and a challenge of the first order.

This last year has been mostly good, with periods of extreme turbulence. We feel our way forward, step by step. She is in such a hurry to be an adult, and sometimes, when the going is rough, we see her point: it would be great to be able to relax. The way I imagine (probably erroneously) we may be a little more relaxed when she's twenty-four, or thirty, or thirty-five. But mostly I wish I could stop time.

When she was very little, as she was in this picture to the left the summer she turned three, I would ask her if she would promise to always sit on my lap, or at least, if she would promise to sit on my lap until she was thirty. And then I could sit on her lap. And she always giggled, not so much at the idea that she would be big enough to hold me on her lap (although now that is somewhat funnier than it was then), but at the idea that a day would come when she wouldn't want to be that close to me. Where my lap wouldn't be inviting.

Of course that day came. She is sixteen. She wishes she were taller, and that her hair were straight (a friend spent many hours ironing it for this photo, to the right). She is learning to drive; she is thinking about college. My job now is to embarrass her, in every possible way. I try to live up to my responsibilities, and apparently I do a pretty darn good job.

I'm still hoping that when she's thirty, she'll let me sit on her lap. Or maybe she'll have a daughter who will sit on mine. That would be almost as nice.

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