One thing that started this summer was Emerson preferring sometimes to read to herself at night before falling asleep rather than having her dad read to her. Not always, but sometimes. On these nights she turns a small camp light on in the windowsill. It is a kind of magical thing.
Magical because her room is starting to become her own.
Magical because she is an amazingly bright reader and we get to watch her process of discovery. Magical because she believes in mood rings and fairies. But it’s a smidge sad too.
So many moments in parenting are like this. You can’t wait for your child to “grow out” of phases and stages and then these turn out to be the little things you gently mourn when they are gone. I know this is how I will feel about crawling in next to her in her twin bed with too many pillows and stuffed animals.
Sometimes we read together in my bed and I get totally exasperated because she likes to joke, and read out loud and ham it up.
When I was five or six I came out of a restroom laughing to myself. “What’s so funny?” my mom and dad asked. I had read my first graffiti off a bathroom stall wall at a Mexican food restaurant in Flagstaff, AZ. It said, “Close Encounters of the Turd kind”. I giggled. They laughed. It was funny then and you know what, it’s still funny.
Two nights ago she came into our room and said she was feeling really sad. “Why?”, her dad asked her. “Because I was thinking that one day I won’t be alive anymore. I won’t be around. I’m afraid that all these things, the afterlife and the spirit world are just legends.”
I said come here and snuggle me. She crawled in and I squeezed her, and I subjected her to Walt Whitman’s, Pioneers! O Pioneers! which I love and which drives her crazy.
