On Watching Our Kids Grow Up

My youngest daughter turned thirteen last week, and we celebrated her with all the simple pleasures she requested. Munchkins for breakfast, spaghetti for dinner, Funfetti for cake-making, a make-up palette called Sweet Peach in a tiny, confetti-strewn gift bag.

I captured the day in mental snapshots. The frilly pink peonies blooming in a jar next to her bed. Colorful pom-pom garland strung like a rainbow above the dining room table. Her wide, orthodontia-filled smile as she took her first step across the threshold of this new land.

Over the past year, she’s slowly made changes to her bedroom–the room we painted cotton-candy pink for her the summer before third grade. Out came the small trinkets she’d collected over our years of travel. Out came the photos of friends past with their striped tees and toothless grins. Out came the scattered papers with random doodles and clothes that seem to have shrunk overnight in the wash.

In went the blush colored throw pillows she chose for herself at Target. In went the bulletin board with its rotating clippings of cheerful motivational sayings and pictures of ice cream or make-up or art projects printed from the internet.  In went the perfume bottles and hair products and teen clothes that somehow “fit”, but also mysteriously appear tinier than the ones she removed in the first place.

As she has grown and changed so has her self-expression in her most intimate space. I love to watch every iteration of her inner life as it blossoms outwardly across the walls of her bedroom. To my joy, there was a single hold-out from the early days, and I took heart every time I entered her room and the cheerful, illustrated spines of her childhood picture books greeted me from the bookshelf.

Until yesterday.

Yesterday, she exchanged the bookshelf for a much more practical chest of drawers, and I found her books haphazardly thrown in laundry baskets sitting at the top of the stairs. Doctor Ted smiled at me from one book cover. Edwina the Dinosaur looked as if she might wink. Fudge, the ultimate troublemaker, stared out from a mailbox, while Mandy the Mermaid floated in a cobalt sea.

I gasped when I found all of our companions gathered together in one place, whispering their childhood secrets to one another from the comfort of my plastic laundry bin. It’s enough to rend a mother’s heart, if only a little, for all the nights spent snuggled up together on her bed reading stories aloud as her cotton candy room transformed into a playground, an ocean, a castle, a ship.

She said she kept a few of her favorites on a small shelf next to the new drawers. I haven’t seen this reduced collection yet, but I can’t wait to see what she held onto–which companions she deemed worthy of crossing this threshold, which stories still matter to the heart of a girl in the body of a teenager.

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