My girls keep growing. It amazes me no end because I’m not one to encourage growth in other living things. It’s not that I actively discourage it, mind you, but as a gardener I’d be given a dishonorable discharge for killing things while they’re still underground. Yet my girls grow, no matter what I do.
Case in point: Jelly went to the temple today to do her first-ever baptisms for the dead. It was one of those wistful “my baby’s not a baby anymore!” moments; the kind where there really isn’t anything I can say to my snuffling wife that doesn’t sound incredibly trite. “Yep! She’ll be leaving us any day now!” No, that wouldn’t be politic under the circumstances.
It was even wistful for her dad. Since turning twelve last year she’s been steadily growing into this elegant young lady who still looks a lot like the little girl who continually prances around the house dreaming about fairies, but who also now spends copious amounts of time draped over the easy chair in her bedroom consuming books of all kinds, including her scriptures. We’re already staring down the barrel of another (her second!) girl’s camp this June. She doesn’t talk as much smack about teenagers anymore because of the realization that she herself will officially be one in just a few weeks. If you see a flag waving from someone’s house on Flag Day this year, think of Woody and his new live-in teenager.
Sigh.
Doodle, meanwhile, has been in double digits since last December. The challenge here is the cognitive dissonance created by a mind that still wants to be a little girl, and an increasingly traitorous body that desperately wants her to grow up. Now. The result is that classic blend of occasional klutziness laced with newly hormonal pathos that makes parents think fondly of boarding schools in Switzerland where we apparently have no extradition treaty.
We tell Doodle that she’s not a little girl anymore. This statement is belied by the presence in her bedroom of more baby dolls than the number of pages contained in Obamacare, two strollers, and enough stuffed animals that, if we sold them at one dollar a pop, would probably take care of the national debt of Ecuador.
Still, the age of accountability has arrived. My mother will find it absolutely knee-slappingly funny that I – her oldest child – have begun using the “P” word when talking about my daughters. “P” for “potential,” that is. The one word I swore in my youth I would never use on my own kids. But it’s true. They both are loaded with it, and I’ll be darned if I let them reach my age without ever having explored their own limits. In fact, Dad has actually had to sit his daughters down and (oh, the humanity!) lecture them about… about… THINGS. IMPORTANT THINGS. THINGS that Dads frequently wish they would never have to discuss because their loving and dutiful wives would already have discussed them, but which never seemed to stick so Dad had to sit them down and DISCUSS THEM AGAIN. Oh, it’s a vicious cycle.
No, they’re not babies anymore. And Dad’s not getting any younger, either.
