“Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent.”
― Carl Sandburg
Ariel in 2013, with Dona.
Today is a special day. The light of my life celebrates her nineteenth birthday.
It is such a cliche to ask where the time has gone. Last week, I was looking at framed photographs of her through the years, and experienced nostalgia that was nearly panic, looking into the familiar eyes, the familiar face, the smile filled with baby teeth, of that beloved child. That child is lost to me forever, at least those earlier versions. Every year, she is replaced with the current, updated version of herself. I love them all, but I cannot help but miss the Ariels of Birthdays Past, even as I love the current and future Ariel more every minute.
Today she is everything on my list of gratitudes. Whenever I doubt myself, my life, my choices, I know I have this one thing that turned out perfectly because of me and in spite of me.
An earlier birthday girl also loved black horses.
The funny thing about time is that the hours and days seem to pass so slowly sometimes, but the years pile up in a hurry. We could probably adjust to it more easily if it were only the time that were passing, but in reality, with it, time drags everything into a constant evolution.
The baby who held my earlobe for security and played with pairs of plastic animals in the bathtub all too quickly became the toddler who told me, “Ah, shit!” from her car seat one January when I told her that Kiddieland was closed for the winter.
Ariel in the Summer of 2014.
I remember the first time she insisted on walking into school on the first day of first grade without me, dressed in a purple down parka, with a backpack that was so big next to tiny her that it almost dragged the ground. She trudged up the gothic stairs at the Lab School, her blonde curls bouncing in the wind, and when she didn’t even turn back to see me in the car line, I cried. I want her to be independent. I want her to not need me. But maybe not just yet (even still).
Ariel on Dona in 2005, trusted friends ever since then.
When Ari was seven, we bought a pony that ended up being not suitable for a child. We found this out when the pony spooked at the barn owner’s dog and sent me sailing in a fall that left me biting through the nerve in my lower lip, my helmet breaking (saving my nose), gravel embedded in my face, and a bruised kidney. As I leaned over the bathroom sink trying to determine if the grit I was spitting out was my teeth or arena gravel, I heard the other barn kids asking Ariel if her mother was alright, to which she screamed, “Well she would be if it weren’t for your asshole dog!!”
Birthday Past 2013.
I can recall a million tiny details. A million moments in time that, when woven together, knit my favorite story of all time, a story where the heroine is a sassy, intelligent, resourceful and hilarious beauty with the golden tresses, the dazzling smile and sparkling blue eyes even better than a Disney princess.
I am grateful. I am grateful for each moment and each memory. I am grateful for all those bathroom stops we had to make on every road trip; I am grateful for the times we went to war over homework; I am grateful for the Halloween costumes and the pink birthday parties and the back to school shopping, and the friend dramas, and the messy bedroom and the undone chores and the done chores. I wouldn’t trade a minute of it.
Ari and Byttersweet in 2008.
Today, she is a freshman in college and we are beginning the next chapter in this wonderful book. I am so proud of you, Ari, and I am so grateful to have you for my daughter. Happy Birthday. I love you!
~ Mommy
PS – Yes, I am making you a flan instead of a birthday cake 🙂
Ariel and me 1999.
Ariel in Summer 2014. Photo © Visual Stimulus Photography
Ariel in 2011
Moving. Everybody hates moving, right? It is the menstruation of life events, not catastrophic like major illness or death in the family, but never good. No one likes moving.
patience.
“I’ll bet you think this blog is about you, don’t you? Don’t you?” ~ Carly Simon (well, almost)
You should never want to be in someone’s company unless there is nowhere else that you want to be. And the person you are with should feel the same way. I have a dog that demonstrates this everyday. He lives to be near me. He cries if I leave the room. The other day, I ran to the grocery store. When I came home, my daughter told me, “He cried, literally, the whole time you were gone.” He would rather sleep next to my bed than eat his supper. His priorities are painfully clear and he unashamedly demonstrates them every moment that he can.
in·fi·del·i·ty
I am a family law attorney. The issue of infidelity arises in nearly every dissolution case. Sometimes it is a single affair that is the coup de gras that ends a relationship. Sometimes one spouse has been aware for years that marriage has not really affected the other spouse’s dating life or pursuit of other sexual partners (sometimes prostitutes, same-sex prostitutes, and even transgendered prostitutes). The who that a person cheats with is usually (but not always) less important to their partner than the fact of the cheating.
Infidelity is rarely an isolated affair. Once a partner passes the threshold of cheating, the second time is easier and the third time easier yet. Pretty soon, the partner engaged in the deceit becomes so habituated to it, that it evolves into a norm. In many of these cases, a person who has repeated affairs has a partner who has learned to tolerate it for a number of reasons. She may be financially dependent; there may be minor children of the primary relationship; she may no longer be sexually interested in her partner and is grateful for him to pursue those endeavors elsewhere. In other cases, a cheater is matched with a partner who chooses to believe convincing (or not-so-convincing) lies rather than confront the truth. The believer can be a willing participant in the deception.
intimacy. Relationships are fed on intimacy and the more effort that each partner puts into the other, the more both prosper emotionally and intellectually from the relationship. Grass is greener where you water it. If the goal is to connect to your partner, then any deception is contrary to that goal, whether the deception is an extramarital affair, a lie about anything that matters to the other person. (Obviously, I am not talking about surprise parties and the like.) Deceit is tantamount to betrayal, and that many headed beast can ruin a relationship and crush the emotional well being of the betrayed.
alert like rosy sentries at full attention over an impossibly tiny waist; and she could slake the lust of Zeus himself in the bedroom. She is Florence Nightingale when he ails. She doesn’t nag. She doesn’t get headaches. She never says a cross word about his mother or his friends. She does not compete with him on any level, and if she were to do so, she is incapable of beating him. And for the love of God, in the unlikely event that she menstruates, she certainly never gets PMS. Great expectations, or not so great, as the case may be.
To be fair, the Prince Charming ideal trained into the minds of little girls is similarly unrealistic: The heart throb millionaire who charges across the drawbridge on his white horse singing a ballad of love everlasting while his washboard abs ripple beneath his armor like the taut muscles of a Derby colt.
But it gets a bit worse, because Cornflakes has a preconceived notion about you, too. And maybe all that stuff that looked so good on paper when he first met you is not working out so well for him now. For example, your assertiveness is now controlling. Your intelligence he now views as a challenge. He loved the idea of marrying a career woman, but now he resents that you’re not Suzy Homemaker. The independence he once admired, is now aloofness, coldness, or maybe even selfishness. Cornflakes wants you parked on the sofa next to him while he watches TV (only breaking to fix his mother’s recipe for meatloaf) until he goes to bed where he will want to have four minutes of sex before he is snoring. This is not what Cornflakes bargained for either.
There are precious few things in life that chronically return that continue to deliver fresh delight, but true friends are among them, and while I was really trying my hardest to bury myself in my work and lick my Monday wounds, along came Mindy, my bestie since middle school, in text messages, in my email box, on the phone, and in a package that she shipped for my birthday. And within that giant box she packed 34 years of memory flashbacks in one thoughtful, fragrant parcel.