Recently in Memories Category

Four years ago, my daughter was born. Four years ago, I became a mom.


My own mother used to tell me that she considered my birthday as much her day as mine, because it was the day she gave birth, the day that she became a mother. For many years I rolled my eyes at this. Not anymore. I know, now, exactly what she meant. For fours I've known.

Emilia's four years have been four years of her growing and learning and transforming from an impossibly tiny - and impossibly loud - little baby to an impossibly mature little girl. They have, for her, been fours of wonder and joy and frustration and love and screams and hugs and tears and giggles and giggles and more giggles. They have also been, for me, four years of sleep deprivation and confusion and anxiety and learning and learning and learning and - of course, always - wonder and joy and love and laughter. These have been her four years, but they have also been my four years. They've been her four years of becoming a little girl, of becoming - of continuing to become - her. But they have also been my four years of becoming mommy, becoming a mother, becoming me. Because becoming a mother has been one of the - if not the - defining transitions of my adulthood. It, more than almost anything I've done in the last two decades (almost) (gah), has made me who I am. Becoming a mother was a birth, of sorts, for me, too.

And such a birth it was.


Happy birthday, baby girl. And happy BIRTH day, me.

We spent the weekend going to country fairs. We spent the weekend on Ferris Wheels and watching tractor pulls and eating cotton candy and ice cream.



It was good.

My heart still aches, and I still struggle, daily - hourly - with the challenge of coping with the emotions surrounding my father's death. I still look for ghosts. I still yearn for ghosts. I imagine that I will always yearn, that I will always strain my ears listening for his whisper, and my eyes looking for his form. I imagine that it will always be this way, that it is always this way, when you miss you someone so intensely that the force of the missing almost seems to fill physical space, to make actual sound.

Even in the sunshine, even through the din of carousels and demolition derbies and carnies.


I imagine this, but I don't know. I don't know if this experience of loss is universal, or if it's just me, stuck in my head and my heart with stories, and the memory of my father, who I loved so very much, who I so worried about, who I so wanted to protect, who I so wanted to preserve and keep and hold with me forever and ever and ever. Who I try to keep with me even now, by spinning words, trying to bind the memories and the feelings and hold them fast.

And so I go, round and round on this carousel, not ready to let go.

But I know that the sunshine is there - I stick my hands out and I feel it. I'm still living. Really, I am. I am eating cotton candy and licking ice cream and listening to the hum of life and really tasting, really hearing. It's just that those tastes and sounds - all the feeling of life - is complicated by something darker now. Not in an entirely bad way. It just is.


Ice cream still drips, here, in this space. And it still makes toddlers even more beautiful than they already are. I can enjoy it, love it, exult in it.

But I still wake at night and cry.
 

Two weeks ago, a week or so before my father died, I read a post, as part of the Community Keynote at BlogHer. My father figured in the story that I told in that post. It was a post that was mostly about my mother, but my father figured centrally, and his role in that story demonstrates what an extraordinary man he was, and is, and will always be.

And that, now, is one of the most important things about that story, for me.

Below, the full video of the Community Keynote. My reading is towards the end, the second-last keynote of the night. I post it here in his honor.

August, 2006. That was what my little feminist looked like before she grew hair and an attitude.

No, wait. She always had the attitude. Hair just seems to have intensified it.

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