Momming – Signal: Interrupted

Last month I got all gushy over Kenzie, my beautiful firstborn daughter, turning eighteen. Well 2016 is a year of milestone birthdays for the De Baets girls, as today, Caitlin (aka Baby Girl, aka Cait the Great) turns thirteen years old.

(Before I get any further, I want to heap some thanks and admiration on Scott, who is such a wonderful father to our girls. He kind of got relegated to footnote status in my post about Kenzie, so I want to make sure I recognize him at the start of this one. Thank you, Scotty, for giving so much of yourself to our daughters. They’re beyond blessed to have you as their dad.)

The big one-three is a milestone for all adolescents, marking the official entry into teendom. It’s a scary but exciting time for them, and if memory serves (iffy), comes with no shortage of chaos and confusion. Am I still a kid? Do I get more privileges now? Shit, will I have more responsibilities now too? Will I ever again wake up and not find new hair or zits somewhere?

Me? I’m delighted that I can now say, “I have two teenage daughters.” To be clear, I’m grateful for the convenience of lumping them together under that description, not necessarily for the reality of having two teenage daughters, which, frankly, is kind of terrifying.

But also kind of not.

I loved my babies as babies. In my experience, babies are (for the most part) fun and sweet, and their heads smell good, and their tushies don’t smell as good but at least they’re cute, and they make adorable little sounds (the babies, not their tushes, though an argument could be made for that too), and they’re super portable and you can pretty much make them do whatever you want. Kids are awesome too, for a lot of the same reasons and many more; watching your kids as they learn and try things and develop personalities and interests is thrilling as a parent. That’s a little person forming there! A little person that YOU made!

Seriously, how could you not love this?

I’ve loved my children with every ounce of my being for their entire lives, but—and this is where it might sound a little weird/creepy to some—I feel like it’s been the last few years when I’ve really fallen in love with them. Hear me out.

If you’ve ever been in love with someone, you’ll know what I’m talking about. It’s that feeling of pure, heart-leaping joy that you get when you see them walk into a room (all made even heart-leapier when they’re just as happy to see you). It’s wanting to hear them share the details of their day, even if you already know what they did. It’s longing for their company, wanting to spend time with them—doing something or doing nothing—and it’s feeling that empty space inside when you’re missing them. It’s hating some things that they do without remotely disliking them. It’s taking an interest in what they’re interested in and conversating (it’s a word) about things—anything. It’s having inside jokes and laughing until it hurts. It’s raw vulnerability and the safety of knowing you can talk to them about anything.

This feeling isn’t exclusive to romantic relationships. It’s how I feel about my daughters, and it’s a feeling that didn’t start to really form until they got a little older and we started experiencing the world on closer to the same level. I don’t just love my grown-ish kids, I’m in love with them.

So today I think about Caitlin, one of the two loves of my life, and how awe-struck I am by the person she is. I mean, maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised, because her older sister is pretty fucking remarkable too, but the cynic in me constantly wonders how I—profoundly flawed, nowhere-close-to-having-my-shit-figured-out Erin—could have hit such a jackpot. Twice!

But there she is, my second jackpot. She’s a young lady who is immensely talented and smart and funny, all without a trace of arrogance. Caitlin is a kid who isn’t afraid to be weird and goofy and geek out about stuff and laugh at herself (God, she has a laugh that can turn my day around), but who can also be poised and well-spoken when life demands it. She loves music, can’t control her excitement when a song that she likes comes on (even if it’s on a playlist she knows by heart), and loves to sing along like me, though she’s way better at it. She taught herself how to play the ukulele and to write in calligraphy and to throw a devastating change-up and to rap “Guns and Ships“, and that was all just since Christmas. 13298062_1005129962912324_447479028_n

Caitlin is so sensitive and her heart is so open that it is literally making me cry right now just thinking about it (cue her saying, “Yeah, but you cry at anything!” Guilty.). There have been observations that have come out of my youngest daughter’s mouth within the last year that, even when they’re motivated by her response to terrible evils, are so full of love and wisdom that it makes me speechless with pride.

When Caitlin loves, which is almost always, she loves deeply. When she hurts—and she does, as all of the biggest-hearted people do—she hurts deeply. Which devastates me, but also fills me with such thankfulness and hope to know that there’s a person like her in the world at all, let alone right here in my world.

In Kenzie’s 18^th birthday post, I did a little self-congratulating on getting her to adulthood, and I stand by that achievement. I know that we’re not quite there yet with Caitlin, but I know the five years between now and when she rings the adulthood bell are going to fly. They always do. There’s a lot to celebrate about getting to thirteen, but I also know we haven’t seen the last of the tough days either; honestly I’m not sure we’ve even scratched the surface yet (there’s the cynic again).

But that’s okay. If Caitlin is who she is at this point, after just thirteen years of learning and growing and questioning and laughing and crying and loving, I am nothing but hopeful and eager for who she’ll be in another five, or thirteen, or thirty years. She’s already way ahead of the curve. And yes, I’d think that even if I wasn’t in love with her.

Happy birthday, Baby Girl. You astonish me every damn day, and I love you bigger than the universe.

If you see me today, there’s a good chance I will be crying. It’s okay, I’m fine. It’s just that my firstborn turns 18 today.

I’m not sad about it. What would be the point in that? Being sad won’t make her be a baby again, and I don’t think I’d want her to be anyway. Don’t get me wrong: she was an awesome baby. But I sort of totally love the big person she is even more than I liked the baby.

Come on. Are you serious? That face!

No, the tears come from a deep emotional response to the reality that I* made an adult. She made it, she survived, in spite of no shortage of fuck-ups on my part as her mother. Shit, she’s reading this, I probably shouldn’t say fuck-ups. Wait, she’s an adult now, it’s all good.

Let me take you back for a minute.

I went into labor around 6 PM on June 1, 1998, and I remember being kind of excited (amidst many other emotions) that it looked like the baby would be born on its due date, June 2.

Nope. She arrived at five minutes past midnight on June 3, and that—the simple act of being born that way—would establish a few key attributes about our Kenzie girl:

She’s often late (I might be partly to blame for that, both genetically and practically).
She does things on her own terms.

Kenzie has always been an old soul. From the time she was very young, she has had a wisdom that belies her chronological age. She would gravitate toward adults before other kids, carry on thoughtful conversations with no hesitation, and she has always seemed miles apart from the immaturity that many of her peers have lingered in over the years.

Make no mistake, however; she is a goofball through and through. darth kenzie But in some ways, I think even that—the undaunted embrace of her own silliness/nerdiness/awkwardness— is a testament to her maturity; she approaches life’s interactions with the kind of “I don’t really care what anyone thinks” attitude that some people twice her age (*cough, ME*) still struggle to adopt. Her confidence astonishes me, in the best possible ways.

Kenzie is fiercely loyal and exceedingly thoughtful. She puts others before herself on a near-daily basis. Parents will get this: did you ever have those moments, when your kids were very small, when you’d stub your toe or hit your head or something, and your little one would toddle over to you, aware of your pain, and give you a kiss, maybe tell you, “It’s okay, Mommy.” That’s Kenzie with everyone she knows, still, to this day. The past couple of years have been pretty tough on our family unit, as we continue to adapt to our new “normal,” and there have been times when I’ve broken down. To have my teenage daughter, who has every right to be wrapped up in her own dramatic world (I acknowledge and respect wholeheartedly that a teenager’s world IS full of drama), put her arms around me and tell me, “It’s okay, Mom”—there’s no describing it. How in the world did I earn the blessing of my children?

[I’m totally bawling right now, if anyone is keeping track…]

Kenzie’s friends mean everything to her. She gives gifts for no reason other than to show she cares. She listens to other people’s litanies of ways that life has knocked them down, even on days when she herself feels that life pitilessly has her against the ropes too. She is a profoundly better sister to her little sister than I was to any of my siblings (sorry, y’all), protective and nurturing of Caitlin, and yes, tough when she needs to be. It’s not to say that Kenzie doesn’t ever have fights with her friends or family. She is still human, after all. But even through those, she speaks her mind and doesn’t back down from her convictions and says she’s sorry when sorry is called for.

Being Kenzie’s mom has been mostly wonderful. She is smart and so funny and seeing her tell a story about something she’s excited about is one of the most joyful things you can witness.

Of course we’ve gone through valleys with the peaks (human, remember?), but even during the worst times that I can remember over the last 18 years, the difficulty for me, as her parent, was that she was hurt or angry or struggling with the things in her own head, and I couldn’t get in there far enough to fix them. She’s always been like that, introspective. I remember when she was going through a particularly rough patch around third or fourth grade, one night she told me, “I just feel sad and I don’t know why.” It broke my heart, for obvious reasons, but it also struck me what a very wise yet simple feeling that was for a child to identify and communicate. It was around that time that I really invested myself into practicing empathy, a life trait that I work really hard to instill in my kids whenever I can: making the effort to, if not understand, at least recognize the pain that sometimes doesn’t have a name, in yourself or in others. There are some thing that we won’t be able to fix, not always right away, anyway. But if we can learn to call those things out and acknowledge that we “don’t know why,” they become less scary. My daughter taught me that.

People who have known me for a long time know that my parenting philosophy is this: I strive not to screw my kids up too much, I want to screw them up just enough. I say it half-jokingly, and largely as a way to forgive my maternal shortcomings with a little levity, but I do think it holds some truth. We have to prepare our kids for the world, a world where we won’t be able to protect them all the time. Many years ago, I heard parenthood described in another, similar way that really resonated with me: our goal as parents shouldn’t be to raise good kids, it should be to raise good adults. That’s what they’re going to be for the majority of their lives, so that’s where the focus should be. Well I don’t know how it happened, and I would never dream of claiming all—or even most—of the credit, but I look at Kenzie today, and I’ll be damned. She’s a pretty good adult. Looks like we screwed her up just right.

So I wish you the happiest of birthdays, Little Girl. I am amazed by you, so fucking proud of you, I love you bigger than the universe, and I can’t wait to see what’s to come for you. Thank you for making me a mom and then teaching me how to be one.

(*I don’t want to close this post without throwing heaps of praise, thanks, and crisp high-fives to Scott. Scotty, you are a remarkable father, rightly adored by your daughters, and I am fortunate to have you as my co-pilot on this parenting journey.)

Category: Momming

My Second Jackpot

I Made an Adult!