August feels like a lost month. Slow boiled, a pot left on the burner and forgotten until a quicksilver memory sends you back to find it pitch darkened and empty.
And so my daughter, my sweet little, is 10. It is different at 10, you know. That extra digit on one side. The roundedness of zero. The empty whole of it.
“I don’t want to grow up,” she sighs on every day but her birthday today, when she didn’t say it. She doesn’t need to say it. It is the lyric we all live our lives by, and now she does too. The going is always gone.
Once I would have called it bittersweet. But I don’t taste too much the bitter any more. It benefits us both that her mother is ancient, so long and well-lived. I’ve lived forever! A hundred years or more, and the last hundred years were the best 10 years of my life.
I don’t want to grow up either. I don’t want to expend a minute of energy nursing myself: my make believe dreams and unrealized aspirations, the tug, the rift, the tides. I don’t want to become anyone else, or even more of myself. I’ve yielded that floor, scuffed and rutted.
Instead, I’ll take the sky. That sky!
Happy birthday baby girl. The world is yours.
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And what a night for that sky – shooting stars and all. Happy Birthday Georgia – 10 has been fun at our house so far.
Comment by Renae C — August 13, 2009 @ 6:31 am
Happy Birthday, Miss 10 year old! I love that saying, "The going is always gone …"
Comment by Erin — August 13, 2009 @ 10:56 am
Happy Birthday, GG!
Comment by Wendy — August 13, 2009 @ 11:07 am
Oh, so lovely.
Comment by Mama Goose — August 13, 2009 @ 4:24 pm
I'll take the sky too, please. (One order of sky coming up!)
Comment by Jennifer/The Word Cellar — August 13, 2009 @ 4:57 pm
With such pleasure, we prepare our replacements.
Comment by Chris Austin-Lane — August 13, 2009 @ 6:18 pm
I do so enjoy your writing.
Comment by Cat — August 13, 2009 @ 6:31 pm
And in perfect synchronicity, Cat, I do so enjoy your reading.
Comment by Karen Maezen Miller — August 13, 2009 @ 6:52 pm
wow! love the last paragraph. copied and pasted into my inspired moments brain.
thanks!
Comment by latisha — August 13, 2009 @ 8:05 pm
It is one of my daughters birthday today, 15 years. And I feel of late, writing and sharing and at peace, like she is in the rest that I almost am. And that makes my mamma heart happy.
Thank you for this space here.
Comment by deb — August 14, 2009 @ 2:06 am
Awww! My daughter also turned 10 on Aug. 12. I enjoy reading your blog.
Comment by Jodi — August 14, 2009 @ 5:55 am
Thanks.
By Jodi who just commented.
Comment by cranejo — August 14, 2009 @ 5:58 am
I adored this – thank you!
Comment by kareso — August 15, 2009 @ 1:31 am
"I don't want to become anyone else, or even more of myself. I've yielded that floor, scuffed and rutted."
And doesn't it feel sublime. I wouldn't be anyplace but here, right now. Your words speak to my soul, as always.
Comment by Kathleen Botsford — August 15, 2009 @ 4:13 pm