Growing Up is Hard to Do

I've been working on a tv show outline about 13 year old girls. It's made me have to re-read Judy Blume to remember BEING a thirteen year old girl. Then slowly, it all comes flooding back. How much I loved Scott Baio and was devastated that we would never, truly, marry. My horse. Reading horse magazines. Pretending I had a huge family. Reading, and daydreaming. Not knowing anything, yet seeing everything clearly without brain clutter. Things are crisp at 13. Your body is an embarrassment. Nothing is the same, everything is changing. You're becoming more than you're ready for.

In the middle of working on this tv show outline tonight, I had Lilly the 8 month old nursing on one of my arms while I typed one-handed with the other hand. It was past 8 0'clock, Barry was reading to the kids, and they kept coming in wondering when I was coming to put them to bed. Could they sleep with me? For special, since we had done that when Barry was gone in Las Vegas on the weekend? Would I come now please? Okay, I finally agree. The baby had fallen asleep. I finished writing and tried to put the baby down in the other bedroom but she woke up and cried so I piled her back up on my chest and took her into the big bed in my room and climbed between the two big kids in there. The baby smiled groggily at Nathan and I made him turn his head so she would lose interest and fall back asleep. I tried to rub both my big babies on their backs or legs or whatever part I could reach while trapped under sleeping Lilly on my chest, so they could feel some love as they were falling asleep. Emma went down first, and Nathan had a harder time, but eventually snuggled under my arm and the blonde tumbleweed hair stopped tumbling finally. I felt all the ideas for the tv show bubbling in my brain and floating around. I thought about how writing hasn't failed me, even though I've pretty much always expected it to, to run from me, arms flailing, waving a white flag of defeat. Then I could finally relax and become a gardner or a loan officer or something less frightening. But no, here it is, it's still sticking it to me.

I felt my three kids next to and on top of me. I thought about how miraculous this is, that my body whom I barely acknowledge these days (we're strictly on a handshake only basis right now), has worked so hard to create and nurture with life-giving milk these three wonderful growing beings. I actually (with wondrous Barry) made these three people. Putting them to sleep at night and feeling them piled in there, it's like being covered in miner's gold. It's 1880, I'm Levi Strauss, floating on a raft, covered in miner's gold and dreaming up blue jeans. It's so mindblowing I can't even get it right. Somehow my body has done three things right. I haven't even said thank you.

I turn over and look at Emma. She's six now. She's the baby, or she was until tiny Lilly came along. She's six. She kicks one leg out of the covers, leans up while still asleep, and folds her two hands like she's praying, under her head. Lays back down. Sleeping like that. I look at that soft sleeping face, her long hair, her little white stomach, her long, sweet legs. I hear Judy Blume's Are You There God It's Me Margaret in my head. I'm growing, she keeps saying. I'm growing, God.

I keep watching and thinking about Emma and how all I have to do is let her keep growing. Help her to keep growing. Little me, from nowhere, with no well-defined map and a very tiny lamp. I'm here to help her keep growing. She trusts me. Me with no lamp, and no relationship with my own body, and certainly a faulty one with my heart.

You don't grow as a child as much as you grow when you are growing a child. It's like Jack's Beanstalk. You think you have the bean, and you've grown the plant to the treasure, but you're only at the first level. The beanstalk keeps going up. There's no story for that part because I haven't gotten there yet, and for the people who have, maybe nobody talks about it because it is too, too beautiful.

Up there, past the clouds. I'm still climbing, and look look at this there's all this warm, breathing gold.