Memories...

Motherhood has a very humanizing effect. Everything gets reduced to essentials. ~Meryl StreepHow things change over the years! I do actually remember my daughters like this. They were the clinging limpet sorts. Liddy is notorious for not even speaking to her father until she was 3. If he so much as looked at her she burst into tears. I couldn't ask anyone to babysit her because she cried heartbrokenly the entire time I was gone no matter how much she liked them if I was around & available. The child that at 2 was marching round issuing orders became the young girl who wouldn't make a decision. Best not to even mention Ditz. My mother would remark tartly that the child would never learn to walk if she were never put down & when, against the odds, Ditz walked at 6 months, bribbed by her siblings with strawberries, I heard, "She has two perfectly good legs of her own"...but Ditz liked to be carried on my hip, close to me & where she could be in the thick of things.Demure? Ditz? Photos are deceptive & the camera has always liked Ditz but we have gone from that to this:My girls have grown up. Liddy spends her days away from me making decisions & issuing orders. Ditz walks perfectly well on her own two legs & occassionally tries to pick me up & cart me round. The balance of power has shifted imperceptably. Children do grow up. Only the memories remain. I look at my girls, who are now bigger than I am, & I don't regret one minute of the hours I spent cuddling them because the hugs are fewer these days, the hurts less easily mended with a hug & a kiss & our time together grows short.