There are moments in parenthood that are so staggeringly beautiful that I can feel the seams of my heart splitting open. Some I can anticipate, like when my family met our babies for the first time. Others slip into my blind spot and catch me unaware.
Several weeks ago, while giving my husband and me a tour of her work at school, my daughter strung together a pearl necklace of these moments. They alternated between cultured, expected gems, and freshwater treasures we couldn’t have foreseen. She showed us art she’d made, books she could read, and an exercise in fractions that used circle segments to teach halves and quarters. We beamed with pride and gratitude for our growing girl.
Then she brought us a book. “ATALAVMILIFE”: A Tale of My Life. With her teacher’s guidance, she’d written and illustrated her autobiography. In ten pages she chronicled her birth, the arrival of her brother when she was two, and how she learned to walk and talk.
On page two, she felled me with her pencil. “When I was a baby,” she wrote in her own way, “I cried a lot. My mommy helped me feel better.”
There we were in her picture, she and I.
The colic. What I heard was “thank you for loving me through the colic.”
When our daughter was a newborn, she cried for nine hours every night for three months. We didn’t know if the screaming would ever end, if our daughter would ever smile or be happy, or if we’d make it through another day.
Recently I babysat a friend’s infant at our house. My children loved playing with him, but when he got tired and began to wail, it really rattled them. They sat on the floor with their hands over their ears and watched, blank-faced, while I tried to soothe him. My daughter, now six years old, studied how I held the baby close and made gentle swooshing sounds as I walked him slowly around the room.
She saw me do for him what my husband and I had done for her. All the love poured in, all the miles we walked inside our tiny, snow-bound cottage in the country. All the songs, the whispered “it’s all right”s, the “shhh-shhh”s and the “Mommy and Daddy are here”s. She took them all in and gave them back to us in her handwriting. 
Those times pass quickly, but they are treasured.
One of my favorite lines is – “Before you know it they are 26!”
Love,
Pat
A glimpse of the full circle of the universe. Wow.
My daughter is in high school now. Over the years, I have been buried in the avalanche of papers that come home from school. What I always treasure and keep, though, are the journals and selfmade books that chronicle her evolution in her own words and handwriting. So precious.
So harmonious with how I feel as a parent. I love this blog, Whitney.
Pat, Erin, Randee, Kerry–thank you for your kind comments. So nice to have a community of readers who understand!
This one brought tears to my eyes. My 2 month-old daughter cries for an hour each night (which is not nearly the marathon 9 hours you went through). Her daddy walks her through the house until she finally succumbs. It’s her way of venting the stress of her day, reminding me that it’s hard to be a baby sometimes.
Welcome, Kerri! I’ll be thinking of you in the evenings and sending good vibes. We finally had some luck calming our daughter with a white noise machine. The “wind” setting was best. In a pinch we’d use the fan on the stove hood, turned up to high. It sometimes took a while, but the loud, even sound seemed to flatten out all the stimulation that was overtaxing her system.