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A daughter is yours all of her life.
A son is your baby ’til he takes a wife.
The wife then becomes a daughter twice over.
More daughters to love and care for.  Moreover,
The son, now a man, is a boy to HER mother.
More love is spread ’round and now babies to smother
With kisses and wishes and grandmothery hugs.
This is the pattern of life, living, and loves.

TMC

I was thinking of my daughter Kelli when this poem came to me.  Kelli and I had a difficult few years before she left home.  I think she became a woman earlier than most.  Two women have a hard time sharing one house.  Now that she is on her own, I marvel at her.  She is brilliant, I have always know that.  Now she is shining.  She has come back to her mother faster than most young girls.  I wallow in the friendship we now have.  And she is beautiful!  How I gave birth to so gorgeous a woman I’ll never figure out.  Of course when I say that out loud, her daddy takes full credit.

Kelli has an “old soul”.  The moment she was born, she was wide awake and looking around.  Her wail was a statement, “I’m here! Look at me!”  And everyone did.  Within moments she was passed around between family and friends who admired her like a fine antique.  She didn’t fall asleep for four hours after her birth.  The nurses we’re amazed, but I wasn’t.  It was Thanksgiving Day, 1988.

She was a good baby.  She didn’t cry too very much and soon learned to sleep six hours at a time.  For a newborn, that was something grand.    She was five weeks old the last week in December.  I remember the day so clearly.  Her tummy was upset and she was fussy.  I was walking and soothing her when the phone rang.  It was my father. Dad never called me.  He would get on the phone after mom talked, but he never dialed my number himself.  With the baby in my arms, I listened as my father told me my little sister had been in an accident on her way home from our house in Orlando.  On her way back to South Florida, she had a seizure and crashed her car into a tree stump.  She was dead at 16.

“No.  Nononono” I cried as I slid down the wall, five week old Kelli still in my arms.  I hung up the phone in a daze.  I placed the baby in her cradle and looked into her eyes.  She knew.  She was no longer crying.  She was no longer just a baby.   Her eyes said what her tiny mouth couldn’t.  I knew that moment that she was special beyond just being mine.

Baby Kelli helped me through the toughest days of my life.  Her needs were what kept me going.  And going and going! She was a precocious child.  She learned to talk, walk and run all on one day.  Good thing Bald is Beautiful, because she had only fuzz on her head for the longest time.  I would affix bows with a dab of glue to the top of her crown!  She was a porcelain doll!

Dan and I were having problems adjusting to family life.  Just after her 1st birthday, we separated.  Listening to everything but our own hearts was our fatal mistake.  One that took many years to correct.

Now a single mother, Kel was all I had.  Looking back, I know that I pushed her too hard to be perfect.  Mostly I wanted my family not to worry about me.  A trophy child was the way to dissuade their disappointment in my failed marriage.  She was beautiful and smart and entertaining on cue.  She was willful and pigheaded and brazen and I don’t know where she got it!  (Although everyone else thought they did.)  She did everything early.  Talking full sentences by 18 months, potty trained before two.  Training wheels unneeded and cast off by four. She had two houses and two sets of rules. And took fair advantage of all of it.  She skipped first grade even.  That is one thing I would never allow again.  Younger now than her classmates, yet much older than them in many respects.  She was un-satisfiable.  She had a hard time with the other kids.  That drove her on.

Then Dan and I figured out why our lives were so empty.  The mistake we made so many years past was corrected.  Together now in a real home, we cemented the door “closed to retreat” with Brandi’s birth.  No longer an only child in a broken home, nine year old Kelli didn’t know quite what to do.  Haha. Which rules could be broken and which no longer applied.  What she had prayed for she got and she wasn’t sure she was glad.  It was fun to watch her.

“Dad said. . .”
“No he didn’t!”
“Rats!”

I homeschooled her from 5th to 8th grade.  She now tells me she hated it.  But when she went back to public school as a freshman in High School she was different.  Academically she was ahead and socially she was advanced. She now had a gaggle of friends.  She did well for the most part.  She was a teenager and we battled which was to be expected.  No one was prouder in the auditorium when she marched across the stage in her cap a gown.  Still seventeen though, we had an awkward five months to go until she was free of my meddling.  Ha like that would stop me from being her mother!

She is almost nineteen (going on thirty) and on her own now.  And scared for me. And for herself.   I promised her everything will be ok.  I am not going to die.  I won’t let her down.

Yesterday, she told me that an email had been sent out in the large office complex where she works, asking if anyone had an RV they could loan to an employee’s mother for the duration of her cancer treatment.   God love that girl.  I know I do!   Kelli is another one of my heroes.  I am going to tell her next time I talk to her.

It’s 4:00 again.  Another day passing with no treatment against the monster.  Unless of course, we count the love between a mother and a daughter.  As we should.

As we should indeed.