Let’s just play in the dirt again

This applies more and more each passing year.

I just found the note I wrote to Cristina in 2002 on March 31.

Let’s just play in the dirt again

As I peeked into the quiet room, I gazed upon the sleeping girl. The slight snore from the persistent allergies signaled that deep sleep – the kind of sleep where dreams of animals talking and people visiting from other worlds comes.

How I wanted to curl her up into my arms and snuggle one more time in the rocking chair, tucking my nose into that place on her neck where the sweet smell of babies linger.

Except that girl is now a woman.

“Turning twenty kind of sucks,” she told me earlier this week. “It sounds old and yet you are still too young to legally drink away your sorrows.”

I didn’t focus on her use of that word “legally.” She is, after all, an independent college student who is “legally” of age to die for her country.

How can it be that twenty years has passed since her grand entrance into the world? It seems like just the other day she was clamoring for a bottle, throwing grits from her high chair, climbing onto furniture, begging to play outside, running through the house, sneaking into the bed in the middle of the night and pointing that little finger to make her point.

They say the hardest part about becoming a mother is being needed so much.

I say, "Ironically, the hardest part about watching your child turn into an adult is not being needed so much."

Happy Birthday, Miss Priss! The past twenty years have been the best twenty years of my life.

©Betty Jean Bowers