Sixteen.
Today –to be accurate, around 3 or so this afternoon – my Girl turns sixteen years old.

Holy shit, y’all.

I won’t ask where the time went, because I know exactly where it went. It piled up like clouds in the Texas sky, an upended cerulean bowl marking the hours with streamers and cotton floss, golden pink sunrises and amber purple sunsets, lowering thunderheads and forgiving rains.

It’s been wild.

I can <mostly> remember the day she was born. I remember being in the labor tub. I can remember that I was done with the labor tub and getting out. I vaguely recall the slightly panicked faces of the midwife and the now-ex husband as I heaved my huge body out of the water.

I will never forget the feeling of waddle-walking to the bed, and the feeling that I needed to hurry hurry hurry because she was totally going to fall out¹. I wanted to be in the comfy, king –sized bed to have her. It seemed important. I have NO idea why.

Labor-transition brains are weird.

Being a parent is hard. You raise and care for and instruct and bargain with the gods and nudge and bribe and hold hands and shelter and then comes the part where you are supposed to just let them go. Like, “O HAI U R AN ADULT NAO” and what do you mean you want a part time job and how can you even think that getting driving lessons is going to happen and don’t you know that you are my baby?

But, she isn’t. Not really, anymore.
She is becoming a young woman, becoming her semi-fixed² personality, becoming her own self.

She is becoming.
So am I.

I think…I think that this is how it works.

.

¹– SPOILER ALERT: she didn’t and there was literally no way for her to do so. But, that feeling – physical and mental – persisted. And so I waddled as fast as I could to get to the bed.

²– Yeah, no-one’s personality is perma-fixed.