Eight

My daughter’s teeth stand in a crooked row. Her two cuspids rise above the rest, turned diagonally like twisted fence posts. The uneven spaces in between her teeth make a crooked grin, but she smiles wide anyway. She laughs with her mouth open, and her blue eyes disappear for that moment as joy swallows up her whole face. Sometimes she talks too loudly, not yet having learned a girl’s acceptable volume, not knowing to hide her enthusiasm.

We have more baby dolls than we need. Like a teenager longing for the latest fashion, she scrolls Amazon on my laptop while I make dinner. She points out all the dolls she wants and doesn’t yet have. I find her dolls naked and clothed, sitting and lying down, in chairs, in corners on the floor, in the backseat of my car. They have names like Tate and Molly Lou, Lily and Autumn. One is named Silver because my daughter named it when she was only three and will not change it even now that it seems absurd. Silver is bald with a hard plastic head and a pink dress. At night before bed, my daughter wanders through the house saying, “Where is Baby Silver?” and then tucks the doll in bed with sheets under her chin. When she goes to her dad’s house for the weekend, she gives me elaborate instructions for her dolls. It’s as though she’s leaving them with a real babysitter who needs notes on the fridge detailing their routine. She walks around the neighborhood with her dolls in a stroller, puts real diapers on them, rocks them to sleep in the crook of her arm, and takes their temperature with a pretend thermometer and sincere concern across her brow. 

But this summer, I notice when we walk on the sidewalk and pass a house with kids she knows playing in the yard, she asks me to push the stroller for a minute. I see that familiar blush of embarrassment when she is afraid of looking uncool. My own moments come flooding back, stored deep in the body. I remember that same flame in my own cheeks. Sitting on the edge of my friend’s swimming pool when I was twelve, my legs burning against the hot concrete in my ruffled pink bathing suit. When I showed up at the pool party with my flat chest to find everyone else in underwire splashing with the boys. Changing clothes in the locker room in middle school gym class when I listened to the other girls chatter and felt like the only one who hadn’t yet kissed someone. Pretending to comprehend the crude joke muttered by boys in the back corner of tenth grade algebra class when I didn't understand it at all. Mothering my daughter pushes me up against all the edges I thought were long forgotten. I’m surprised to know they still burn. 

My daughter is only eight. Or she is already eight, depending on what angle I examine that number from. She looks through my underwear drawer sometimes and holds up lacy bras, asking when she will wear one. She sees tampons in my bathroom cabinet, knows what they are for, and asks, “but does it hurt?” There are things I tell her, like what it feels like to give birth and when I started my period, how the swirl of red blood surprised me in the bathtub. And why I cried, not wanting it yet. And there are things I don’t tell her. Being a woman in a man’s world means we are always on guard. We nurture everything around us, answer every need, work through our own blood and pain. It is easy to forget ourselves and become consumed with the nurturing. We ignore the heart beating in our own chests when we tend to someone else’s instead. 

I do not tell her that there will come a time when she will learn to store her rage and discomfort in little sealed boxes buried somewhere inside where others cannot see. I tell her about her father on the day she was born, the way he held her as I cleaned myself up. And then the way he passed her off to me and slept in the fold-out chair of the hospital room. I held her all night long. With the lights of the city out the window it felt like we were the only two people in the world. She and I, of the same blood and bone. But I skip the rest. I don’t tell her about the way love can twist a path in your heart like a hot knife and leave a phantom ache where someone used to be. I don’t tell her about the muscle it takes to get up and start again. 

She gets angry at me sometimes, for reasons big or small. She screams with a fire I am envious of, not the smoldering mess of my own anger which only ever stays in my throat where I have tamed it. She yells or stomps her feet, and now she twists a conversation like a debate when she wants to get her way. Childhood tantrums are fading, and instead we have this, the origins of what I know will eventually become adolescent independence. But when the fire calms and we take a few minutes to ourselves, she will come back for me to say “Mama, I’m sorry,” an apology that comes out of her mouth sounding sure of itself, solid and real.

I read a line in a book once that said to love someone long term is to attend a thousand funerals for the person they used to be. The thing no one ever told me about motherhood is that it would feel so much like mourning. As Dickinson says, I felt a funeral in my brain  when I caught my daughter in the light of her bedside lamp last week. She was reading, and the angles of her face looked more pronounced than round. I caught that certain glance every parent knows. Years fall away and, just for one instant, we see a glimmer of who they will become in some faraway place and unnamed year. As all the heavens were a Bell / And being but an Ear / And I and Silence, some strange Race / Wrecked, solitary, here - 

Her older brother is embarrassed if I even dare to cut his sandwich into shapes when I remove the crusts, but she still asks for notes in her lunchbox. Usually I scribble something in Sharpie on the rough paper towel when I’m packing lunches in a dark kitchen while the house sleeps. Last year I found all the notes I’d given her saved in the zipper pocket of her lunchbox. All the messy I love yous and Happy Fridays, or the occasional I’m proud of yous. They’d gone through the wash until they were soft and faded. She kept them anyway. And now, with eight years behind her, she has started passing her own notes back. Slipping an I love you  back to me with a dirty lunch container so that I find it, crumpled and stained. I imagine her at a crowded lunch table talking with people I don’t know and scribbling a note to me. Little breadcrumbs we pass back and forth so we have something to chew on, something to hold onto as these years fall away like sand through a sieve, gritty and soft, faster than I can catch them. 

I cannot hold onto any of it. It is hers. She began inside of me, bone and blood, but she will take her own shape. I cannot predict the world she will make for herself. But I can sit down at the blank page and pour it all here. I tell my students, don’t tell me what something means, just show me what it looks like, what it feels like in your hand, what it sounds like. If the image is enough, you don’t have to make meaning of it. It will get caught in your throat like a secret you want to hold. Just put it on the page and let it echo there. 

So here we are. Your freckles run across the bridge of your nose, and I watch them darken and then fade with every passing summer. On Tuesday afternoons, I brush your hair to pull it taut and twist it in a bun for ballet class. It is golden and shiny, wispy untamed bits always falling back down on your forehead. You dance naked before you get in the shower. You don't care yet what it looks like or what others would say, only dance. Things you still say without embarrassment: I’m scared. This hurts. School is fun. Mama. I love you. You sometimes fall asleep next to me when I am reading in the dim light of a lamp, and your limbs get heavy on mine. Your breath slows to a rhythm that holds me here in this moment where things are exactly as they are, crooked teeth and all, in between now and later.

-Katie Mitchell

Katie Mitchell is an English teacher and writer living in Northern Georgia. Her work has been published by Huffington Post, Infection House, Yellow Arrow Journal, and Appalachian Review among others. As a seventh-generation southerner, she is currently writing a memoir exploring how the changes in her own life have mirrored the evolution of the region itself. She is represented by Folio Literary Management.