There’s something about long overdue tasks. They take on monstrous proportions the longer you hold them at bay. In May, yes, the MAY of two months ago, we brought home a few large cloth bags of clothing after the annual swap at Melissa’s home. Celebrating birthdays (a lot of May births in our family), we took the opportunity to let the three oldest sift through a mound of clothing and decide which they wanted to keep, to save for later or to pass down the line.
The little one, a watchful V. was no doubt calculating what existed now to imagine her wardrobe in 4-5 years. T. took home the most loot, being the right size at 9 ½ to fit roughly from 10-14 years old…her love of color and style is still diverse so everything seems good. One year older, P. drew her line in the style world (mostly black) and wasn’t interested in as many clothes. S. surprised us all and took home some ‘vintage booty’ of her aunt’s early 90s closet – Melissa, her MIL & FIL had front row seats at a fashion reboot that was better than any fashion week I could be lucky to enjoy in Paris – but this is for another post…my S. is already in her adult head and skin and this post is about childhood and it’s nearing end. It’s about T. and this cusp I know she’s on…she’s still my child, but her head and heart are preparing for the next level – the tween (a horrid time IMHO) and I’ve been holding on to her childhood tighter and tighter as it nears this change.
When S. was turning a tween, she was age 11, we were visiting Disneyworld in the fall of 2015. In the hotel’s cozy theatre they were playing the latest Disney release, Inside Out, a coming of age inside the brain of a tween the same age S. was….and it from the same state of Minnesota. There’s one scene in particular, one of devastation and complete loss, where specific childhood memories come crashing down into the abyss of the character’s mind when she loses unneeded information – like a mud slide that takes thousands of lives in a few horrifying moments, people whose full stories of life were never recorded or if they were preserved in photos or journals, those two were swept away in the reeking mud of total annihilation. That’s what it looks like as this mountain of memories is swept away, crumbling into dust inside her brain.
If you are laughing (or cringing) at the above description and its over the top drama, well, there’s quite the case for it. I mean, everyone goes from 11 to 12 to eventually 16 and then 20 and so on…growing up is not really a disaster. It’s inevitable and it’s just life. But at the moment that scene came to it’s climax, both Brent and I fell into full-on shaking, hideously ugly sobbing. The kind of crying that isn’t really movie theater appropriate (where a wiped eye or a small hand clasp can get most normal humans over the edge). But we weren’t normal humans. We were parents of a daughter who was on the precipice of childhood and we knew were losing parts of her we’d never, never get back. And there she sat, next to her equally oblivious 6-year old sister, both innocently absorbed in the movie, watching with enough detachment to know that this seemingly wasn’t about them. Sierra eventually caught a glimpse of us and was appropriately embarrassed, but she saw our weeping as just her parent’s pathetic silliness, she completely missed the foretold disruption of her own future.
This brings me back to that mound of clothes we brought home from Milwaukee this May. The end of July is when T. turns a full decade and that’s the date we were encroaching on when T said, “MOM! We HAVE to do the clothes.” T hates messes, but like her mom, when they get overwhelming, they seem impossible to fix. By then, the clothes were half in the bag, mostly on the floor, mixed with previous summer clothes and it was difficult to tell what was dirty and what could be set back into T.’s dresser. But her looming party with guests was a good motivator. T. turned on her Mama Mia soundtrack and we got down to it. The cleaned clothes led to a cleaner closet and a Marie Kondo-like purging of mostly plastic crap from leftover gift bags. But then something hit me like the mudslide from four years ago.
T. had been cleaning out the doll buggy near her doll house– the one handcrafted in Germany, a woven, basket-like buggy with a wood frame and red rubber wheels. It’s little wire sun shade had red fabric with a print that looked practically pre-WWII. My mom had picked it up when she and dad were in Germany the month before S. was born some 15 years ago. I loved that sweet little basket. It creaked when you pushed the wicker handle and both girls had strolled down the sidewalk with their doll babies and stuffed animals in it. Once she finished cleaning it out, T walked it to me and said, “Let’s save it in the box for the attic. I can give it to my kids.”
So, I dutifully sat down to unscrew the base from the wheels to make packing easy. And at that moment the Abba song, “Slipping Through My Fingers” came on the soundtrack. You know the one if you’ve seen Mama Mia – the almost-grown daughter on her mother’s lap. Meryl Streep is polishing her screen daughter’s (Amanda Seyfried) toenails as they prep for her evening wedding. It sent me over that precipice and I saw T.’s childhood on the endangered list.
I headed to the bathroom and broke down into a big blubbering mess at the thought of my baby giving up her childhood toy with the maturity to know that she’s outgrown it and someday she might want to share a treasured plaything with her own babies. I sat on the toilet and cried my eyes out as I twisted at the screws. Like twisting my heart out (most dramatically, I should add). Still cleaning in her room, T. didn’t see her mess of a mother on the toilet seat, but I can only hope that she would have been appropriately embarrassed if she had.
