Every now and then I look into my archive of Posts I Forgot to Ever Publish.  I’ve got journals filled with ideas and bits and pieces of article starts and story lines and sentences that go nowhere and words that have never seen the light of day.

I fell across a sweet one tonight though.

London is thirteen years old now.  She has the recipe for her own specially curated potato soup inside of her head and she makes it spontaneously, no need to refer to to the original instructions any longer.  She is capable of being an excellent map navigator and she is learning how to speak Spanish and how to handle algebraic formulas and she mothers Otto as tenderly as I do.  She’s a sweet friend, a funny conversationalist, a good listener, a serious thinker.  Her art is beautiful and she has a grown up haircut and opinions about clothing and our Sunday afternoon plans and the president and how people should act.

 

 

But she used to be seven years old.  She used to have missing kid teeth and to be addicted to this one hat and to this one pair of those five-finger Vibram shoes that were so popular for a spell.

She used to be little and her world used to be full of new and never-before-known experiences.

And so when I found this little unseen post so full of this fond memory and realized that I had never published it, I could not resist bringing it forth into the light now.

She was seven.  She’s not any longer.  But this is all exactly and completely true still.  I feel just the very same.

(And also.  I might note – I was planning to mix current photos and older photos for this post.  And then.  Then, I found all of these older photos.  And.  I couldn’t stop adding them.  My heart very literally hurts to see these.  All the change.  The precious and tender youthful beauty of my now-teenage daughter.  My brain is a train wreck – instantly imagining those heart-wrenching senior picture slide shows full of pictures like this. NO.  Time – stop it already.  For. The. Love.)

 

 

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I could tell it was a first-time experience because of the surprise on her seven-year-old face.

Our entire family was sitting in the living room, scattered on furniture and the floor and the giant red bean bag that the kids have nicknamed because it seems more like a friend than a place to sit.

And London was laughing.

Laughing so hard that she was, in fact, crying.

I don’t remember what was funny.

 

 

I just remember watching her body convulse with giddiness and tears stream down her soft cheeks.

I loved it.

I loved that she had never known anything could be so funny you would cry.

And that she had never realized that tears can be happy as well as sad.

And I loved that

I was there.

We were all there.

Family.

The whole jumbled, messy, confused beautiful lot of us.

Family.

The people who hold all your memories.

 

 

Like the time you lost your temper and said that one horrible thing.

And the time you got that phone call far too late at night for it to be anything but bad news.

The time you completed your first 5K and ran across the finish line.

Like the time you laughed until you cried.  For the first time.

It is lovely.  Noble.  Sublime.

And difficult.  Arduous.  Complicated.

That is just how this family thing works.

It’s why it matters.

and why it hurts.

 

 

Because it’s both.

It is always both.

At the same time.

And we sleep and wake,

breathe and sigh,

live and die,

in that tension.

With one another.

Family.

 

 

 

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