Fourteen

The word sounds like lip gloss and trips to the mall.  Like posters of cute boys and long, late night phone conversations with a best friend.  Fourteen is the windows rolled down and the music turned up.  It’s your face buried in my neck, muffling the quiet sobs of your first broken heart.  It’s the loud slamming of doors and an all too familiar, “Mooooommm, Isaiah won’t get out of my room!”

Fourteen is discovery and maturity.  It’s when I start to see you as a woman and you start to recognize me as a friend.

That’s fourteen, in my mind at least.  I don’t really know for sure what it would be for you, and I never will.  For me the reality of fourteen is wonder and wishes and that still-empty seat at the table.

My mental image of you has lost its definition.  You’re not a baby anymore.  The few photos I have of you detail a tiny baby body, all wrapped up in a blanket of pink and blue stripes.  But that’s not who you would be now.  Fourteen seems so far from that image.  In that way you feel less familiar to me.  I long to know who you are, but I’m only sure of who you are not.

Fourteen years ago today I was a mom for the very first time, blissfully unaware of whether you were in fact a “she” at all.  I’m old fashioned that way, I wanted to wait and be surprised.  The wait only lasted until the next afternoon when the surprise was revealed.  You came and then just as quickly you were gone.  But what matters most is that you came.  The heartbreak of your leaving will never surpass the joy that I have in knowing you are mine.

Fourteen doesn’t look, sound, or feel anything like I thought it would, but that’s okay.  I don’t need to experience what I had hoped fourteen would be in order to honor what it is.  You will always be my joy, my first born.  You will never leave my heart.  And at fourteen, like every year before and every year yet to come, your life will always be a reason to celebrate.