BEN

The other day, Daniel called me to the window that has a view of our deck. Michael and Alec were re-staining it and listening to music while Mia was off to the side, dancing and singing. She was dressed in a white blouse and white shorts, barefoot, hair uncombed, skin very brown from swimming, and she was singing and dancing and twirling her heart out, completely unaware that she had an audience upstairs.

Daniel told me she’d been doing that for the past 10 minutes. We both watched her sashaying, hands on her hips, doing moves she must have learned from TV. We smiled at each other, then Daniel went back to his computer. I stayed to watch a bit more, and felt such a wave of emotion and love for her. As she sang she closed her eyes and lifted her face to the sky. She was so perfect and innocent and beautiful.

I was already struggling with the lump forming in my throat when “Dancing Queen” by Abba played. That did it. The floods of tears came as I watched my pure, sweet girl dance and sing without a care in the world.

We risk so much when we become parents. We feel emotions that we never even knew existed. I find myself having to change my mind or get busy with something else during these moments because if I stay there, I’m bound to have my heart in knots every time. So I did just that, I tore myself away from the window and hurriedly went to clean the bathroom.

I was never one of those parents who had a hard time seeing their kids start school for the first time or who followed the bus in their car. Perhaps because I was quite young (23) when I had Nicholas, I was in fact happy and excited for him with each new milestone, imagining myself in his place and the excitement I felt at each new adventure. It’s still like that today. For Nicholas’s 18th birthday, Daniel and I took him out for dinner and gave him a round trip bus ticket to New York (and our permission to go). While Daniel was very quiet, his eyes looking suspiciously bright throughout the meal (especially when Nicholas opened his card and gasped in surprise), I was thrilled for my firstborn, remembering how I loved to walk the streets of New York when I was 18.

Maybe it’s because they are boys but I feel much the same with my other sons, although when Alec turned 10 two weeks ago I did feel pangs of nostalgia that my baby boy with the red thatch of hair on his forehead was now this muscular and strong athlete. And as soon-to-be 14 year old Michael grows up to be a young man any parent would be proud of with his kindness and thoughtful ways, I think back on him as a fat little Buddha of a toddler and feel like it was just yesterday. Yet I see myself as not overly sentimental in the least.

So nothing has prepared me for my reaction to Mia encountering the same milestones her brothers have. One would think, been there, done that. Not so. Watching her get on the school bus for kindergarten last September was so traumatizing for me that after the first morning of bravely smiling and waving on my end, I let Daniel handle that for the next few months as seeing the bus drive away with her was too difficult. Months later, when I ventured to do it again, nothing had changed.

it is her 6th birthday today and so here I am thinking of her singing and dancing to “Dancing Queen” and writing about it. Time for another tissue!