Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Holly turns eight

Yesterday was Holly’s eighth birthday. Past, present, and future: all three manifestations seem to mingle on children’s birthdays. Each year I find myself thinking again about the birthday child’s arrival, about who they are as they celebrate that yearly milestone, about what might possibly lie ahead for them.

Not very much about my memories of Holly’s birth day has changed over the past eight years. The day before she was born, my friend Nancy met up with me at my parents’ house. We sat out by the pond for hours, both of us pregnant with second babies, while our firstborns played in the water. When I finally stood up as the afternoon was reaching its end, I noticed the strange pull and mild ache of early labor. Holly arrived at two o’clock the next morning.

One thing that amazes me about newborns is how much you as a parent know about them the moment you meet them. I wrote in my journal the day Holly was born, recording my impressions of her personality, so I know I’m not misremembering those early ideas about her; I have them in writing. And at the time I thought I was just projecting, describing the personality I might wish for her to have rather than the one I really expected. But looking back, I see how accurate my perceptions were. I wrote that she seemed like a cheerful, independent, pleasant kind of person who would be easy to get along with as long as you didn’t step on her toes, but that she had a powerful sense of self and would react fiercely when intruded upon. And guess what? Eight years later, that’s Holly. Just ask her brother. Sweet and easy-going as can be until he pushes one button too many, and then she’s a fighter. Somehow I knew. Even when she was just two hours old, curled in the crook of my arm in the hospital bed, her dark curls damp, my body weary from delivery, I knew.

Now she’s eight years old. She learned a lot from being seven. She sang and danced her way through much of the year, she learned to swim and ride a bike, and she created enough art projects to fill the Getty Museum (I’m talking quantity, not quality, of course), but she also learned some hard lessons about friendship, some her fault, some not. She learned that you can’t always trust the people you think are your friends, and that you have to be trustworthy in order to keep a friend, and that hardly anything is more valuable than a true and reliable friend. It wasn’t always fun to watch this process, but I hope she carries all of these lessons forward with her as she grows.

She’ll start third grade next month. She has a teacher who likes to sing with the kids and put on plays; maybe she’ll grow into a little bit more of a performer rather than keeping the singing and dancing to the confines of her bedroom. Maybe she’ll start acting more like an eight-year-old and less like a six-year-old in some ways that would really help me, such as, say, dressing herself in the morning. Maybe if she starts acting older, she’ll get along a bit better with her brother, who has little enough patience for girls and especially those who tend to burst into tears after too much (or any) teasing.

She’s a happy, healthy child, and I’m so lucky to be celebrating this birthday with her. During Tim’s first several years of life I tried to write him a letter every year on his birthday. I don’t do that anymore. I just feel like I do so much writing and recording of our lives as it is that it was almost artificial to pour my thoughts about one child and one age into a letter on one day out of the year. If in the future they have questions about how I felt about them as children, Tim and Holly can read my blog, my essays, my collected writings on parenting. I don’t keep a lot of secrets regarding how I feel about much.

I hope Holly will see somewhere in my words how much I love her and how much I enjoy watching her grow. I scoped her out when she was two hours old and saw things in her personality I knew I’d like. Eight years later, I’m amazed at my accuracy but not amazed at how much I treasure her company. She’s a dear daughter, and I wish her every happiness as she steps forward into her ninth year.

2 comments:

  1. What a touchingly well articulated write-up, Nancy. Made me both laugh and cry :)

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