When my daughter was a toddler, I used to hold her by her arms and swing her in circles in our living room, around and around, until both of us dissolved in laughter and dizziness and maybe a touch of nausea and always, at some point, she would say through delighted squeals the same four words: “Be careful with me!”
Be careful with me. Don’t hit my little legs on the couch. Don’t run us into that table. Don’t drop me.
“Be careful with me” became my guiding light, my North Star, my instruction manual — that day and every day since.
The days flew. She is turning 18. Yesterday she was 1, 4, 7, 12.
Time doesn’t make sense when you love a person so much it radiates off your skin. A person who wasn’t here for your entire life, and then here they are, and they become your entire life.
They change everything you thought you knew about love, fear, exhaustion, gratitude, purpose. The world was one thing and now it’s another. Your heart was one thing and now it’s another.
They arrive and every part of them is fragile and every part of you is fragile and it feels like a cosmic joke that you would be allowed to trim their tiny fingernails, let alone raise them into adulthood.
And then a year passes, and five years pass and 14 years pass and all the years pass and parts of them grow less fragile (not you; every part of you is still fragile) and you hope you’ve done an OK job protecting them, but preparing them; preparing them, but not hardening them.
Everyone warns you that it all flies by in a blink. They tell you to enjoy every moment. (Every! Moment! This is wonderful, impossible advice! Nobody has ever enjoyed pinkeye! Not in the history of humanity!)
They say things like, “The days are long, but the years are short.” You nod. You’re sure they’re right, but also: Are you sure? Are they right?
They’re right.
Here’s what they don’t tell you.
You will wonder, so many times, for so many years, if you will ever get a moment to yourself. To breathe. To sleep. To see a friend. To see the dentist.
And then you’ll get a moment to yourself. A lot of them. Too many of them. And you’ll wonder if you took those other moments, where you were everything to them, for granted. (Should you have tried harder to enjoy pinkeye?)
And you’ll wonder if there’s some happy medium, where they need you around and want you around, but also they’re fine if you’re not around. Where you seek out each other’s company to listen to a song you both love or laugh about a thing you both find ridiculous or eat chocolate chip cookies together in a quiet house at midnight.
There is.
And when you find that happy medium, it will be the most alive you’ve ever felt. And you’ll hope they feel a fraction of that aliveness right then, or ever. Or that they’ll at least see that aliveness radiating off your skin. And they’ll know they’re the cause.
They don’t tell you that you’ll get glimpses of who they’ll be at 18, all the way back when they’re 1, 4, 7, 12.
They don’t tell you to tune into those glimpses and treat them like a map, steering you toward hidden treasure.
They don’t tell you to pay attention to that map so you don’t accidentally turn them into someone besides the perfect, brilliant, only-one-in-the-world being they were always meant to be. So you don’t accidentally stand in their way or steer them wrong or forget to be quiet enough for them to hear their own voice.
They don’t tell you that you definitely will, at times, stand in their way and steer them wrong and forget to be quiet enough for them to hear their own voice. And if you’re lucky, they’ll tell you: Stop it.
And if you’re listening closely, you’ll hear what they’re really saying:
“Be careful with me.”
And you will.
I don’t think they tell you all of that when you become a parent. Maybe they do. Maybe I just wasn’t listening or I didn’t believe them or I was too bewildered by my own ridiculous good fortune to hear them.
But I’m sort of glad I didn’t hear any of it. The mystery of it all left room for wonder. It left room to be surprised, newly, regularly, by the beauty and magic and occasional monotony of it all.
Eighteen years flew. Nothing prepares you for how quickly, and maybe that’s OK. Maybe the only words that need to sink into your skin and your brain and your heart are some version of those original four: Be careful with me.
I hope I have been.
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