Exactly a decade prior to writing these words I found myself confined to a hospital bed with monitors strapped to my bulging belly. After an internal exam during which the nurse attempted to wave at herself out of my mouth, I flopped to my side in disgust that my cervix of steel had not budged one bit despite a full day of induction. As I flopped, something in my gut went ping. Hm, I thought to myself. That’s exactly what I always expected it to feel like when my water broke. But nothing leaked out, so sullenly I turned back to my book, convinced that the child would never willingly crawl forth from her cozy, watery home.
Some hours later she was forcibly evicted, shrieking, covered in blood and holding fast to some stringy bit of uterine goo. She yelled for what seemed like hours as I watched the ceiling spin, drunk from anesthesia and with strangers’ hands rooting through my abdomen. Still red-faced and squalling when the nurse handed her over, I hadn’t enough feeling in my arms to hold her tight-wrapped yet wiggly body. Only an hour later was she exhausted enough to stop crying and take the first notice of her amazing new world.
The approach to change she initially exhibited has only strengthened over the past ten years. She refuses to acknowledge its need until outside influence forces her hand. Even then she must be dragged into new experiences screaming all the while, wildly clutching at the past, a thin layer of anger flung up over sheer terror.
In preparing for the party marking her day of birth, it occurred to me how obscenely fast the time has gone since her entry into this world and how much quicker the next decade will go. And it won’t even be a full decade; in just over eight years she’ll be leaving for college or a job. “No mommy,” she said to me not long ago when I mentioned this to her. “I’m going to live with you forever.”
“Oh really,” I said dryly. “You sure about that?”
She was, she said, absolutely certain. She did not want to live in a residence hall. She did not want to go to any other college but the one in our current town. And even after college she envisioned living with me. “Why in the world would you want to live with me when you’re almost grown up?” I asked. “Don’t you think by then you’ll want some independence?”
The concept was beyond her ken. We’d do fine living together forever, she reasoned, as she had a “big enough” bedroom and it was really nice that I was always there to fix her meals.
And do her laundry, she continued. “We need to talk about that, child,” I told her. “It’s time for you to learn how to take care of your own clothes.” This is where her instinctual resistance to change kicked in big time. She utterly refused even to entertain the notion of learning how to sort her clothes, much less the intricacies of loading, detergent measuring or washer starting.
I gazed at her all but crumpled upon the floor and realized I’d need to try something else. “Fine,” I said. “You don’t want to do your laundry? You don’t have to.” And then without another word I stopped doing laundry. I hadn’t intended to cut her off quite so completely, but her fit coincided with a two-day period where snot shut down all my non-essential brain centers, including the one powering laundry.
Forty-eight hours without clean clothes brought the child into my room first thing in the morning, screaming, “Mommy, there’s nothing to wear!” An hour later and with a throat no doubt raw from yelling, she sulked out wearing one of her plentiful but less-favored outfits. Somehow she made it through the day, even though it was the wrong color, too big around the waist and emblazoned with a very silly picture of a butterfly. Somehow she lived, and perhaps after tonight’s shower she’ll be more receptive to lessons on sorting clothes.
Part of me feels horrible for thrusting this child faster than she’d wish to go toward independence, but I know that if I waited for her to be fully ready it would never happen. Perhaps in time she’ll learn to temper her resistance to change. But considering that it’s been with her since the start, I’m not counting on it.
