This post was first published in March, 2008. I love going back and reading through old "house" posts. They give me a  chance to reclaim a lost part of myself, and my children's childhoods; plus, what better way to measure how far you've come on a journey, than by looking back at the starting point?

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Yesterday we had some friends come over for the afternoon, and they stayed for dinner. Because we went from ice and snow a week ago to 80-degree weather on Sunday, we headed out with them to a park we haven't been to in years. When we first moved to North Carolina, we rented a house for eight months in a neighborhood near the park. Those days now seem so far away, yet at the same time, close enough to touch. L. was only 13 months old when we first moved into the house--a blue two-story with cedar siding (and lots of woodpecker holes). I was a stay-at-home mom, trapped in suburbia for long, endless, often mind-numbing days without a car.

"What do you think about when you think about that old neighborhood?" my friend asked me in the car, on the way to the park.

T. had her first solo performance at school yesterday. She even slept in curlers the night before, so she could have real ringlets for the Big Day. Her class has been working on an "Expressions" project the past few weeks. The assignment was to pick a motto that best describes their values, write up a paragraph describing the motto, and telling why it is important to them, and then they could pick an artistic way to express themselves--through art, music, skits, dance, etc. T. saw the musical Annie (hence the wish for curly hair) on DVD over Christmas and fell in love with the story, and the song "Tomorrow." I think she loves it because the sentiment behind the song so matches her personality: think about tomorrow, look forward to the new day, and don't get weighed down by what goes wrong today. Her motto she picked was: "Don't let today take away your tomorrow" which is her creative variation on my favorite one: "Don't let yesterday take up too much of today"--advice I have to work hard at implementing in my own life. 

T. chose to sing the song "Tomorrow" for her Expressions project, and she's been practicing it for weeks now. L., in true big brother fashion, has gotten pretty good at running from the room with his hands over his ears as soon as he hears the first note of the song. I was so proud of T. yesterday for sitting nervously through over an hour of other children's performances, before she got to stand up on that stage on her own. I was so proud of her for having the courage to sing out the words of the song, without any background music, in front of an audience of her peers, and way too many grown-ups and teachers. I'm not sure I would have had the courage to do that at her age.

T. is eight-years old today.

Eight.

It's a lovely number, rounded at the top, and rounded at the bottom. Turned on its side, the number eight becomes the infinity symbol, everlasting and perpetual.

On this day, at eight, T. is all about musicals, and belting out "Tomorrow" and dancing in front of the big bathroom mirror. She wants to be a scientist when she grows up, and study marine animals. She loves her dolls, but sleeps each night with an old beloved t-shirt she outgrew long ago. She loves to cook and bake and she always--always--wakes up with a big smile, chattering about the new day. I imagine the world unfolding in front of her like fluttering silk, the day lit by her energy and spirit.

But one night last week T. was out-of-sorts. She is not a child who broods, or sulks, or lashes out. When things bother her I see them in her face at once, like shadows playing along a wall, and she struggles to put on a brave face, to smile the shadows away. At bedtime I asked her if she wanted to talk, and she shook her head at first. After storytime, she'd been filled with questions about how old I was, and did I like my age, and was I worried about turning 43 next year? Did I miss being in my thirties?

I always miss the year I leave behind, I told her. But turning a year older is like meeting a new friend--scary and exciting, and filled with possibilities.

T.'s mouth turned down at the corners, and the dam broke. She burst into tears, and hugged herself tight, arms across her chest.

"I don't want to leave seven behind," she said, in-between big sobs.

"Oh T.," I hugged her. "It's okay. Eight will be...eight will be the BEST. It will be just great!"

T. is on a mission these days to learn to ride her bicycle. Her best buddy A., who is five years old, just mastered his two-wheeler a couple of weeks ago, and T. feels left behind. The fact that she can't ride without training wheels yet is partly our fault: we just haven't taken her out enough to practice. It's hard during the week, when only one of us is home with both kids, because L. wants nothing to do with loading up T.'s bike and taking her off to an empty parking lot where she can practice. Our neighborhood doesn't have sidewalks, either, so there is no taking her up and down in front of the house--the way I learned when I was a kid. We've also been remiss in helping her learn to ride because, frankly, kids and bike riding have been off our radar for so long. L. didn't learn to ride a two-wheeler until a year ago--when he was ten years old. Yet we took the training wheels off his first bike a good five years earlier, when he was in kindergarten. I still remember the clutching feeling in my stomach as I steadied the back of the bike and let go, for a few seconds, to watch him wobble to a crashing stop. I wanted him to learn to ride so badly--and I know he did, too. We tried over and over again but he just couldn't seem to pedal the wheels and keep his balance, and he was always too upset to try for long. When he outgrew his first bike he got a new one for Christmas, but he still wouldn't ride it. The training wheels stayed on, and as he got older he felt the stigma of this. The bike sat in the garage, gathering cobwebs.

The day after L. was born, a kind and amazing nurse gave us a happy anniversary card. Inside it she wrote, Get used to the little guy always coming first because, of course, our wedding anniversary celebration will always pale in comparison to the other kind of anniversary celebration that comes the day before. I like the fact that L. was born the day before our wedding anniversary. I like thinking back to my wedding day and realizing how I never even imagined that I'd almost share that day with my first child.

The other day I went into a store and browsed for anniversary cards, but left empty-handed. The cards were either too giddy, too mushy, too over-the-top corny, or they were dull and plodding and ordinary cards designed with the much older couple in mind (Wait! Are we the older couple now?)--although why those needed to be dull and plodding and ordinary, I don't know. Scott and I are celebrating fifteen years of marriage today. If the number eleven makes me wince a little when I say it to myself, fifteen sounds gloriously huge as a number. Yet despite how lucky I feel, how happy I feel to be here at fifteen, I find that I don't have anything earth-shatteringly wise to say about it. Fifteen is good . FIfteen is strong and a little weathered around the edges but still burning bright, I think--the kind of warm, steady glow that you just don't doubt. Fifteen makes me feel safe and protected, like I'm standing under a tree that has put down strong and beautiful roots.

Fifteen is everything fourteen wasn't, because it's one year greater, one year bigger and grander than the last.

T. accomplished a huge milestone this weekend. For the first time ever she spent the night away from me. Even when she was six months old, and spent that first post-surgery night in the hospital PICU, I was right there with her. For the rest of her week-long hospital stay I asked the nurses to wheel in a hospital bed so I could sleep with her.

My littlest child, my last child, my youngest, is headed off to first grade today. All around the blogisphere this week, and next, moms and dads everywhere are surely writing wistful/happy/teary/celebratory posts about this time of the year. It's a time for mixed emotions--relief that the long, unstructured summer days have come to an end; sadness and regret that the long, unstructured summer days have come to an end. Joy over this new milestone--a new grade, a new school year; nostalgia for the last one. Every parent celebrates this new school year, and every parent mourns it, too.

I have a running letter in my head I've been writing for years now, a letter to T. Almost every day I add a little to it—all the things I want to say to her and don’t, or can’t; or will, when the time comes.

Some of these things are apologies, for how difficult home life can be sometimes, in those dark, rocky, spiraling spaces of time, when things are bad with L., and how sorry we are that try as we can, there are many days we just can’t strike a balance.

Don't give up on us, I write to her in my head.

T.'s loose tooth is still hanging in there--practically by a thread. Since its appearance we have had many conversations about teeth, and the tooth fairy, and I used her loose tooth as a chance to pull out my own tooth-related anecdotes from when I was a girl, because that's part of your job as a parent, isn't it? To pass onto your children those stories from your own childhood, even if they make them squirm?

On Sunday afternoon T. asked for some computer time, so I set her up in the office with her favorite site, and busied myself peeling potatoes for dinner. Not even ten minutes later T. came out with her hand in her mouth, and an awed, almost frightened look on her face.

“What is it, T.?” I asked her.

“I have a loose tooth!”

Her first loose tooth EVER. She wiggled it for me, back and forth, back and forth. She was amazed, and a little scared, and a little worried, but mainly she felt big. Really big.