So I resisted the overwhelming urge to drive down and get Bear, I waited it out with what I think was quite admirable restraint. On Friday morning, the day I named 'The Return of the Bear' I woke up feeling all excited and brimming full of anticipation. The princess was coming home and god damn I'd missed her.
I had booked the day off work and I had it all planned out. I would be there way before she arrived but I would not act like a Smother (mother who smothers), I would be all calm and collected. I would resist the urge to sniff her hair and squidge her little belly. I would NOT be embarrassing, I would be you know... all cool.
So 12 o clock arrived and Vix and I (who was off school for the afternoon and yeah... ummm... she had permission...) were ready and waiting outside the school. It was blazing hot and we were both struggling with the heat. Neither of us can do heat, we both shrivel like vampires. In fact the girls have been known (on a Saturday afternoon when they've been up for less than an hour - a practice I thoroughly encourage) to scream it burns it burns if I dare open the curtains.
I digress, so there we were cringing from the sun when Vix gives me the LOOK.
'I'm hungry,' she says.
'Yes,' I agree. 'Me too.'
'There's a Subway round the corner.'
'We might miss your sister, we have to be here when she arrives,'
Vix fidgeted, 'Yeah I suppose... they've got steak and cheese on though and cookies.'
I fidget a bit too and give her the LOOK back. The LOOK is our way of saying yeah we shouldn't but let's argue a bit to pretend we're not gonna and then do it anyway.
'We have to be really quick,' I say.
'Of course.'
Two foot long steak and cheeses later, two chocolate chip cookies and a pint of diet coke and we're still waiting. The coach is stuck on the motorway - typical eh? The sun continues to torment us and I can't even have a crafty smoke seeing as we're on school grounds. A half hour later we hear a rumbling and there it is!! Haha she arrives. The coach drives right past me and I can see her little face in the window. Vix and I rush up to the coach and... wait. Unsurprisingly she is the last off the coach.
'Hi mom,' she says as I wrap my arms around her. I wait until her air supply is nearly gone before letting her free. The be cool don't smother resolution has disappeared. I sniff her and hug her and kiss her and though she pulls a face I can see she loves it.
'How was it babe?' I ask.
'Fine,' she replies, 'it was fine.'
I notice that her hair may not have seen the brush all week and her skin has the slightly greased up look which suggests an extreme lack of showering.
'I had a good time, there was chips and burgers and pasta and peas.'
Clearly my worries were unfounded, clearly there were no coded messages in the postcard - I was fretting over nothing at all... I look down and notice her socks. They look strangely familiar.
'Bare when did you last change your socks?' I ask.
She gives me her I will be a diamond thief when I'm older and there's nothing you can do about it mom look and smiles.
'I haven't.'
Em,
ReplyDeleteYou're incredibly good at capturing the everyday emotions that course through the veins of family life; gives us all a chance to stop and reflect upon the things that are really important in our lives. The relationship you describe with Bear is one that any mother - and not a few fathers - can easily identify with: I can't tell you how many times I had to retrieve my daughter, AnnaSummer, from pre-teen sleep-overs that she simply couldn't get through even with the help of her trusty companion Glo-Doll. Until one night the call did not come. The phone did not ring. No distraught squeaky voice pleading for a ride home. I was crushed. I had forgotten about that until I read your latest installment.
It's been at least fifteen years since the last incident - Anna will turn 25 this month. But it also brought back a more recent memory. I visited with AnnaSummer and her significant other (sort of a gender-neutral variation on boyf/girlf) in Austin this past Thanksgiving and when I went to sit my bags down in the guest room there on the bed, faded and scruffed beyond description, was Glo-Doll. She no longer glows when you squeeze her and the rosiness of her bulbous baby cheeks has faded almost to gray and her outfit, once sort of a yellowish, greenish plaid looks more like a woefully neglected potato sack, but the charm still beams through. I had picked her up to examine her just about the time that Anna wandered in to see if all was satisfactory and we just sort of looked at one another and smiled and I knew that I loved her as much if not more than I ever had and always would. It was one of those moments - like waiting for Bear to get off the bus and thinking you'd be cool - right. The nice thing about love is it doesn't have to be cool. It just has to be. And come to think of it that's what's cool about being a parent.
Thanks for the memories. I will pass the story on to my librarian next time I'm wandering the stacks.
-rgh