Everything Must Go

By Beck

Recently it has been very very very obvious that puberty is lurking right around the corner in my house. My oldest child is turning 11 in a few months and in most ways still seems like a little kid with her dolls still carefully lined up on her shelf, rolling snowmen out in the yard, unconcerned and light. But her best friend is suddenly stiller, more deliberate, tall and nearly adult if you see her out of the corner of your eye. She is on her way someplace, obviously, and in some quieter ways, my oldest is starting on her way, too, and things are changing at my house.

I read something the other day – and why do I never bookmark these things? – but anyhow, it said that change is the only consistent thing in our human lives, that everything changes all the time, that nothing in your life will ever remain consistent or steady and the fact that this shocks us over and over again is a weirdly human cognitive dissonance, this refusal on any of our parts to understand that we don’t get to keep anything. And I was holding my baby niece – so, so sweet, so very much like my own babies, my babies I only half-remember now – and suddenly felt this wave of grief, this knowledge that I am done that part of my life, that I will never hold a baby of my own in my arms again. It is over, it is done, it is gone as irrevocably and quietly as my own childhood, as quietly and irrevocably as my oldest child’s childhood is ending around her.

Childhood’s end is both not sad and terribly sad.

I’ve been giving my child lots of “helpful” advice these days, trying to cram in some final bits of knowledge before it’s too late – stuff about boys and boundaries and respecting herself and treating herself like the treasured girl she is – and she is both bemused and slightly confused by this sudden pestering.

“What do you think I’m going to do?” she said to me the other night while I was tucking her in. “I’m not going to suddenly become some other person. Stop WORRYING so much.”

And I was wildly amused – of course, she’s right – and terrified all at once, because I remember adolescence and its endless hardness and the things you discover and the distance that occurs between ten and twenty. And, of course, she is wrong – she will be some other person, some adult self that I do not yet know, she will change.

“You are such a great kid,” I said, kissing her. And although she did not know it, does not know it yet, I was sad when I said it, knowing that in many ways that it’s my summation of her childhood, what I am saying at the end of it. She is such a great kid, I think, and I am both not sad and terribly sad. Everything changes. We don’t get to keep anything.