"Can you hold my hand, my Mama?"
She has taken to prefacing my moniker with the possessive, "My".
I love it. Maybe because she doesn't often seem to need me. That she hasn't really since birth. Her newborn eyes roaming the room to find something of interest to keep her awake. She was never a hand holder. Never cautious. When she calls me "my Mama" I feel as though she is accepting our tie. That she is born of my blood. That though our thoughts are in different languages, our visions in different colors, she still wears my face. I am hers. Her Mama.
I have thought about this too much and not enough recently. What it is to be someone's Mama. What it means to be hers. I have quelled rising panic as she raced up rope ladders to slides too tall for me to reach the tops of, fighting and pushing passed kids twice her age and I have held my breath ever so surreptitiously until her little blonde head came rushing down to the bottom. Her weight not enough to hold her down as her bottom barely grazed the red plastic and she flew in midair, to land on her feet like a cat. To giggle as I exhale a mixture of pride and relief only to hold my breath again as she races around for the second go.
Why can't she stand still a moment? She runs everywhere as though the moment she was looking for might be gone before arriving. To catch a secret just unfolded. She barrels like a stream truck. Announces her arrival like a herald. Says maddening things like,
"I like to go in danger."
"But I want to play on the rocks. I knoooooooooooooow I can get hurt. It's ok."
I have never been ok with the prospect of getting hurt. Never willingly placed myself in any situation where physical or emotional damage was not just possible, but imminent. I see the world through glass stained by precaution and experience.
Her glass is stained as well. Stained well with colors more vibrant than reality could ever hold.
We stand, side by side, each looking through our own glass out onto the world and wonder why the other can't see what we see.
Why am I her Mama if I can't see what she sees?
The last few days, I chose to stoop down several feet to squat at her window. It's painful, the stooping. My back aches with the effort. My body has long gone stiff with age and pride, that it has ceased to bend the way it did before. But the things you see from her window. Oh, the colors.
Every goodness of Christ's character shines from her window- every safety, every precious thought. Every flower and rock and bird was crafted for her delight. Every park played in, every song sung, every ice cream cone consumed was for her joy. Every kiss restores peace. Every hug reinstates love. Every kind word expected, not because it was earned but because she is my beautiful child and she knows it.
She calls me, "My Mama".
And I am suddenly taken with the deepest desire to protect her. To guard her safe. Safe from words telling her that she can't do things. Safe from the fear of the unknown. Safe from the rocks hurling, years away , through the air headed straight for the panes in her window. Safe from, safe from turning into me. Safe from me. My fretful hands. My tight lips. My furrowed brow. Oh God I want her to never lose her fearlessness. I don't want to be the one who snuffs it out. Or worse, transform it into the opposite.
Is this what it means to be a Mama? To ache with the want of raising a child to be her own person while clinging desperately to the hem of her dress as she runs, runs away? How do I let her run and keep her close at the same time? Does it always feel like this? A tattoo shaded over and over open, raw skin. It is painful and beautiful and permanent.
Is it always learning how to stoop? To see things through God-child eyes? To bring yourself down, prostrate to the ground to see out her window? To have faith like a child? Do I pick up the shards of glass that others will shatter, for her? With her? Take the cuts and bruises to restore the cracks? Will it look the same if I do?
She is two and I am learning how to let her go. Let her run. And I hate it. And it is my greatest joy.
But it is not all pain and turmoil and longing and losing.
She still calls me, "My Mama" for now. Still holds my hand. And I will stoop down to her window for as long as she'll let me, fingering the panes still intact, in one piece. Whole.
Who am I to have such a treasure as this?