Cheeks McGoo is growing up and I can hardly stand it. My little precious baby, the daughter who at this time last year was cleaved to my body at least 15 hours a day, that little baby is now driving a car. And it's a red one. And she will periodically attempt to stand on top of it, just to show me that she can.
Thank goodness the car in question is only a small ride on toy as opposed to our family station wagon. If her legs were long enough, I'm certain that she would commandeer that one as well.
McGoo went from crawling and taking just a few tentative steps to reeling around the living room like a wild drunken sailor in the space of a week. Turn your back from 15 seconds, and she will try her best to climb the stairs. If I sit her down in the middle of my bed, she races to the edge, peers over, and . . . laughs.
I don't know what to make of her daring behavior. Miss Bee was a cautious toddler, and I hovered over her in the way that most first time parents do, waiting to steady any potential wobble.
I am not a daring person. I think I have done exactly one daring thing in my life--cliff jumping at Lake Atitlan in Guatemala. I wanted to impress my husband, so after he had taken the plunge, and a number of our other acquaintances had done so as well, I scrambled up the rough-hewn trail at the edge of the cliff.
Climbing barefoot over the sharp rocks and spiny weeds was a struggle. At the precipice, at the literal edge of sheer rock and nothingness, I looked down and saw the water sparkling almost 30 feet below. I made the decision then and there that I wasn't going to jump, and that I would try to go back down the way I had come.
But then, I looked down at my legs, and realized they were covered, just covered, in a swarm mosquitos and other biting insects. So I stepped out. I remembered to take a big step forward, away from the edge, as opposed to merely jumping into the air. (Jumping didn't get you enough distance away from the rocks.)
It was two heartbeats from the cliff to the water.
I closed my eyes as I fell. In doing so, I made a crucial mistake. When I closed my eyes, I tipped my head back and my whole body landed in the water as if I were sitting in an office chair. Feet, thighs and bottom. (I still flinch when I think the sound I made entering the water.) My dear husband swum over to rescue me; I was in complete shock.
The next day, the price of my daring would be revealed, in dark purple bruises from my heels to my back. Even the spaces between my fingers were not spared. I watched in fascination over the course of a week and a half as the bruises slowly faded from purple, to green, to yellow.
Someday McGoo and Bee will take their own big leaps, but hopefully not from a mosquito infested cliff-side in Guatemala. I am savoring these early years before independence.
My daughters, they fill the space between my heartbeats. I don't know how I can ever let them go.
