Time Flies

Ten years ago today, I became a mom.

She was not an easy delivery.  In fact, it came down to about 24 hours of labor and two and a half hours of pushing. 

Which I completely forgot all about the minute she squirmed and screamed her way into my arms.  Utter, hopeless, bottomless, warm and fuzzy, sweet and tender, huge and monstrous love.

She stopped breathing a couple of hours after she was born.  Her lips turned blue and while I banged on the nurse button screaming, “My baby’s not breathing!”,  I experienced the worst thirty seconds of my life up until that moment.  The nurse arrived and took care of her and brushed it off as something that happens sometimes, but that moment turned me into a bit of a hovering mom. 

When we drove her home from the hospital, we passed a school bus and I started to cry, thinking about how I was going to have to put her on one of those someday, all alone, without me.

<sob>

Well, she grew.

And grew.

And grew.

She broke my heart this day:
I held it together until I got back to the house, and then I bawled.

I keep telling her to stop growing.  She’s getting too big.  Soon she’s not going to fit on my lap.

When did she get so big? 
In another decade she’ll be twenty.

I cannot even begin to imagine her in college, rolling her eyes at her mother who is gripping her arm on the way out of the dorm room and has to be forced into the car for the trip home. 

My girl, far away, all alone, without me. 

She’s going to break my heart again someday, I just know it.  But that’s a decade away.  She’s mine for ten more years. 

Just mine.