My Kidlet

It's Mother's Day and I want to write about my daughter. So often these days I'm charmed at her perspective on the world, which is coming through now that she's got more language to express it - and surprised at how much she really does understand and remember.

Yesterday, she was eating a slice of cantaloupe. She bit it into the shape of a crocodile - with bumpy eyes and even a slit for the mouth. Then she made it lollop across the placemat toward me, saying "Watch out - aump, aump, aump!" (biting noises) I said, "Ooh, what is that, a snake?" She laughed, "Aaoh, nooo, Mama, issa cocodile!" And at once I saw that it was indeed shaped like a crocodile. She made it gnaw on my arm for a minute before she efficiently dispatched it.

She's potty trained now (although she still wears a diaper at night) - for a while I thought it was hopeless, until all of a sudden she got it. The key was just putting her in underpants, even though she didn't seem to be ready. Once she was wearing the underpants she learned very quickly what the point of the potty was. Anyway, she'll occasionally wake up in the night needing to pee and will call me. A few nights ago, at 3 am, I heard her calling to me, so I took her into the bathroom. She pulled off her diaper, which had Disney princesses on it, and chatted away quite gaily to me as she peed. My eyes were half closed but I did pick up enough to realize, after a while, that she was pointing to Ariel on the diaper and singing an approximation of "Under the Sea." She has seen the Little Mermaid (actually just the first half of it) only once, and it was several weeks ago. I said, "What are you singing?" She said, "Singing like c'ab. In the water! da, da, da, da-da, da-da-da-da-da..." I said, "Oh, you mean Sebastian, the crab? When he sings 'Under the Sea'?" She got a huge smile on her face and said, "Yes!" I couldn't believe she had actually retained that from the one time she had heard it, weeks ago.

Another time, when we were walking around on the deck outside, I was being cavalier and not wearing shoes, and I got a big splinter in my foot. She heard my indrawn breath and said, "Mama? Hurt cherself?" I said, "Yes, my foot," and sat down to examine the sole of the foot. The skin was broken and the splinter was lodged in it. She leaned over it and kissed the sole of my foot. "There - all better?" she asked. And it was.

I have so many hopes for her. I hope she'll grow up strong and healthy, and be surrounded by friends. I hope she'll be pretty, because life is easier for pretty people. I hope she'll find work that inspires her. I hope she'll be more ambitious and self-confident than I am - I feel so incapable of confrontation in its various forms, particularly managing and directing other people, that many career options are closed to me, and I don't want her to be limited like that. I hope she will love the outdoors and animals the way I do (although I worry that she might not - so far she is clearly more interested in tractors and trains than in living things). I hope the world that she grows up into will be resilient enough to survive the harms that human societies continue to inflict on it. I hope she will find a man who appreciates and loves her and whom she can love as well - and that they'll make me some lovely grandkids. Mostly, I just hope that I can keep her safe as she grows up - guard her from all the perils - so that she'll at least have the options to achieve her desires.