Day 101

I snapped this photograph just after Ellie and I woke up this morning, with the sun streaming in through the window behind us.  Mornings are actually her smiliest time, but it is difficult to capture because she is always skeptical of the phone or tablet I am using to document the moment.  She usually wakes us for the first time before I am willing to get out of bed.  So she joins me for the first meal of her day and then we often doze off again for a bit.

Nitin and I have been working our way through Friday Night Lights for the past couple of months.  In a recent episode, an exasperated teenaged daughter accuses her mother of subtly pressuring the daughter to apply to a college that had been the mother's dream school.  The mother tells the daughter she has it wrong -- she recalls the life she has had, meeting the daughter's father at the college she attended instead and she says gently, "I got my dream. You were my dream." 

When my day begins with Ellie's big eyes and lopsided smiles, snuggled next to me on a lazy Sunday morning, in the immortal words of Bob Marley, she makes me feel like a sweepstakes winner.  I got my dream.  It is a strange sensation, not to be waiting, and to savoring instead. 

I realize, of course, that my dream will have tears and uphill treks and -- shudder -- the teenage years in it.  All the more reason to savor now the smell of her head and the soft tufts of hair that now crown it.  Being her mother has made me fall a little bit more deeply in love with life itself -- as if I was showing off a new place to a visitor, I desperately want to impart the gentle beauty of pink hazy winter sunsets and the particular joy of lying by the fire while wind howls.  

And once again it is terrifying to love someone so much that if she were harmed in any real way, nothing could be okay again.  But it is well worth falling off that cliff.