Just Words

I was just folding laundry, and I kept coming across little tiny t-shirts and teeeny weenie blue jeans. How did these small clothes get into my laundry pile? I swear sometimes I still do not realize that I have a daughter. I smile every single time I see her little things around the house - - find a pink shoe on my dresser, run across an ittie bittie hair brush in the bathroom. It's like a little elf lives secretly with us, and I find her stuff everywhere. I am not in that category of parents which "cannot remember life without her." Indeed I had 34 years without her, and I remember them in exact detail. I, on the other hand, cannot fully get my mind around the fact that I have a daughter. Daughter. That seems like something that my mother was to her own mother. I am that to my mother. But it is most odd to me that Greta is a daughter to me. She is my daughter. (I'm certain I am explaining this poorly.) Every once in a while, I do think of her in the role of Daughter: when she is crying about something and I am trying to make her feel better; when she is about to get a shot and she is lying on the table at the pediatrician's office all smiles, and I think, "You don't know what's coming, but I do, and I will try to comfort you when it's over because I cannot save you from going through it"; and when she and I laugh at the same funny thing and look at each other while we are laughing. Daughter is something you become over time after the first kiss, the first teenage attitude fight, the first love, the first broken heart, the first mean girl in eighth grade, the first time she calls from college just to chat and doesn't want anything, the first shared glass of wine, the first talk about dad in terms of him being a husband rather than in terms of his being a father. Right now, Greta is the keeper of all those little clothes that find their way into my washing machine. She is my sweetest, most special baby, and every so often I catch glimpses of her as my daughter.