booandbunny

We spent the day together, relaxing, laughing, playing, being kids. Of course there were snow angels and snowball fights. There was the attack of the mutant crazy German Shepherd, the hot chocolate and then there were Shrinky Dinks.

The kids had never done these before, so it was fun watching them explore. There were four sheets of dink paper, so to avoid a fight a took the last one and used it myself, creating a tiny sun catcher of sorts out of words such as Expect Magic, Grow Wings, Feed your creative beast; Sigh; Breathe; and, of course, iris, wildflower and maple. As I kept going, I kept coming up with more little words to map my blogosphere. Soon I was just staring at my dink paper.

“What’s wrong,” my daughter asked as she carefully colored in a flower she was tracing.

“I don’t know what I want to draw next,” I said.

“You’ll think of something,” Mr. 6 chimed in.

“Ya,” said Mr. 5, who had abandoned Shrinky Dinks for his “private birthday Play-do.”

“Who knows,” Ms. 7 said, “maybe something will pop up that you never expected … like a magic boat in the air.”

Like a magic boat in the air.

I’ve been thinking I’ve been a bit stingy in sharing my daughter in this space, but her magic boat is the first concrete image I’ve been able to conjure. (And I didn’t even conjure it! I’m borrowing it, actually.) She looks like her Daddy, but she’s the only one of them with my dark brown eyes. The only thing I can imagine would come close to describing my difficulty putting words to my daughter is this: Catching fog. As a storytelling device fog’s mysterious and frightening but for me it’s magical. It’s as close as we’ll ever come to walking in the clouds. I can feel her all around me, influencing so much of what I do, but words for the sensation escaped me until she pulled her magic boat out of the air.

“What’s that mean?” I asked, tucking her into her lavender bedazzled bed, appropriately stuffed with fluffy friends. It was something new she’d tacked to the wall.

“It means be who you are,” she said as matter-of-factly as you can possibly imagine. “If you’re yourself all the time, no one can take your beauty away.”

Well, I thought, aren’t you about to turn 8, not 18? And I hope when you are 18, you still think eXaCtLy liKE THAT! A few more words went back and forth between kisses and hugs and soon she was asleep.

And today, thinking about her boat, her beauty, her bounce, I realized she is poetry. I could say about a million things about mothers and daughters here. The relationship, to me, is one of life’s most mysterious. When I’m asked to describe her I often boil it down to this: She is the perfect blend of princess and tomboy. But there’s so much more. She’s sparkle personified. She’s the zip of a dragonfly. She’s the bend of a willow. She is my daughter, and when I think of all her bright beauty and confidence I pray the world won’t break her spirit. And my prayer is answered in conversations such as this. And then I climb into her magic boat and we do our nails out at sea. And I think of the only verse I can ever remember to this Martina McBride song:

In my daughter’s eyes, I can see the future, a reflection of who I am and what will be. And though she’ll grow and someday leave, maybe raise a family, in my heart I hope you’ll see how happy she made me. I’ll be there, in my daughter’s eyes.