Last Day as an Eight-Year-Old

Dearest Evie,

I am astounded that this is my 10th letter to write to you on the eve of your birth(day).  Tomorrow you will be nine and halfway through your childhood.  I mentioned to Kathy and Olivia tonight that I have been having a hard time coming to grips with you being nine because it means that I'm halfway through with raising you.  Olivia said, "No... you're never through."

That was a great comfort to me, and a great reminder that I will always be your mom, no matter how old you get.  I still need Granna.  You'll still need me.  But the way in which you'll need me will continue to change, as it has over the last 9 years.  Of course, you no longer need help with feeding and dressing yourself, but now you don't even need help with reading or joining FaceTime or opening jars.  But tonight, you needed help understanding your emotions.  You told me that you didn't understand how you could feel happy and excited and sad and angry all at the same time.  Welcome to feeling more grown up, I told you.  We talked about how sometimes your brain has so much going on that it feels everything all at once, and how other times it's telling you it needs a break from so much activity which sometimes feels like sadness, and how other times, it really does feel all of that and more because of the hormones that are changing.  I was proud of you for naming all those emotions and questioning them.

This year I have seen so much change in you.  You have gone from a little girl who wants to make up pretend stories about animals, to one who immerses herself in the characters of video games, books, historical events, or movies, and imagines their lives in depth.  Things are no longer surface level for you - you're diving deeper into your interests, picking up on specific things that catch your fancy and doing a lot of research on them.  Your inquisitive nature has led you to be a good learner, asking great questions, putting together pieces of different puzzles, figuring out how things tie together.

Another change has been the way you talk with us.  I hear more teenage talk, some of which makes me grit my teeth, but I know it's going to come and to continue as you get closer to communicating like an adult.  I hope I can give you a safe place to test out sarcasm and humor - I'm going to do my best, but I may have to leave the room sometimes.

But it's not just the slightly sassy remarks that I'm thinking of with your changes in how you talk - you also are more interested in having deep conversations.  Like when you asked me the other night, what would a person do if they were romantically interested in more than one person, but didn't want to hurt anyone's feelings?  What an insightful question for someone so young!  Or how you ask about the experiences of other people - like the victims of yellow fever when we learned about that at Elmwood, or black people who grew up being told they had to ride on the back of the bus and couldn't go to the same schools as white people.  I love that you are growing up to wrestle with these questions.  Who knows if this is a product of you being you or you being you and also being stuck at home with just grown ups for company for over a year.

I always worry that your only-child status will make you grow up faster than other kids.  But this year, especially, I worry that we aren't feeding your sense of play enough and are making you consider serious topics before you're ready for them.  But then you turn around and want to play pretend as a dog and we play along.  I hope we've given you enough play time....

As I sat with you tonight, after reading you to sleep, I noticed how your sweet little bird lip (where your top lip sticks out over your bottom lip as you sleep) is fading away.  Your cheeks are less chubby.  Your baby-ness is disappearing.  And that's hard for me, in a way, because I remember how this time in 2011 I was aching for a baby and had no feeling of hope that I would ever get to be a mother.  Watching your babyhood drift away, putting away your young kid toys and clothes, realizing that the moments where you want to crawl in my lap are limited now to only church services and doctors visits...  That's been hard to accept this year.  But, at the same time, you have made possible all the little moments I had in my head of what I wanted to do as a mother, not only in your baby years, but now...  We read books, we run errands together, we talk about life, we go to the mall together, we take trips where we can share our common interests of history and animals, we watch you dance and act and sing...  I have many more visions of what I want to do as a mother in your big kid years.  In your teenage years.  In your college years.  In your young adult years.  In your mid-life years.  Forever.

Even though you are halfway through your childhood as of tomorrow...  I am never through being your mom.  And that is the greatest gift.

Here's to a wonderful year ahead, my perfect child.

Love,

Mama