This past weekend, with my daughter away on a trip with friends, my husband and I wandered the quiet house and marveled at the fact that our baby turns eighteen on her next birthday.  That ongoing refrain, “Where did the time go? ” must get tiresome to non-parents.  Still, we can’t help thinking it, can’t help saying it.  Because it does seem almost like yesterday that we gazed at her nightly with wonder as she slept in her crib, her chubby arms stretched out above her head in luxurious abandon.  It doesn’t seem like that long ago that she was learning to talk.  Her first word was “ites.”  For lights.  What a relief it was, for all of us, as she began to learn to express herself.   

Seventeen years ago, our daughter was nearly five months old.  Our baby was, by and large, still a mystery to my husband and me.  We hadn’t yet discovered what made her cry, although it seemed to be most everything.  The motion of her baby swing generally made her happier, and sometimes it eased her to sleep.  This was good, because she tended to fight sleep with an all-consuming ferocity.  The sensation of wind in her face, produced by fanning her energetically with a book as she swung in her swing, was one of the few things that made her really laugh.  The sound of her giggles was magical, like the silvery jingling of tumbling shell fragments in a rain stick, like elf laughter.  What bliss it was to see and hear her giggle.  But in so many ways, she was an enigma.  A demanding alien presence in an exquisitely endearing little package, as I described her in an earlier post.  (See Thirteen Years Ago:  Home with our new Baby, January 2012.)   Our inability to comprehend most of her commands filled her with fury.  She was a Four-Star General in the body of a tiny non-verbal ET.  Despite our lack of understanding, we loved her absolutely.  But we were often fatigued and frustrated.  (See also New Motherhood: An Uphill Climb, January 2012)

 I looked forward to the days when my daughter and I had come to understand one another.  My interests, I hoped and expected, would be her interests.  I pictured her delight in discovering my favorite childhood toys, which I’d saved in anticipation of rediscovering with my own child.  She’d love building with the colorful wooden blocks I got when I was two.  She’d appreciate the beautiful dolls I’d treated with such care: Susie Sunshine, Winkie, Baby Lynne, my Little Women Dolls, Alice in Wonderland, Scarlet O’Hara.  And of course she’d be a dollhouse and miniature enthusiast.  How could she not be? 

For some reason, I expected this contrary, then unknowable creature to evolve into a smaller, younger version of myself.  A cheerier and improved mini-me, of course, unburdened by outsized anxieties.  No OCD please, no repetitive, exhausting worries. Wouldn’t my little clone and I have fun together one day, some day?  Isn’t that the hope of most new parents?  I probably wouldn’t have admitted it, but I know that seventeen years ago, it was among mine.