A Glimpse, a Flutter, a Blink

She cut up her own fruit today.

That’s the whole thing that happened. She got the fruit, she got a knife, and she cut it up herself — and she was proud, because she isn’t scared of the knife anymore. She looked bigger standing there. Not taller exactly. Bigger. And I stood in my own kitchen and thought: how did we get here so fast.

It broke my heart and filled it to the brim in the same four seconds. That’s what this is now. Both, at once, all the time.

I realized it the day my daughter was born, and I still cry about it. My children will spend most of their lives not being children. And I will spend most of mine remembering when they were.

I know the girl she was before she remembers herself.

I know the two pink lines, and the joy and the nervousness I felt when the second one came up and confirmed it. I know how gently I dressed her in a going-home outfit. I know the day I walked through the side door of our house carrying her inside for the first time. Her first steps. Her first word. I know that she called her juice apita for the first four years of her life. I know the moments when her feelings got too big for her and she screamed at the top of her lungs to get all that tension out of her body. I know every word she said wrong, and the voice she said them in.

She won’t remember any of it. I will remember all of it.

And I know the boy he was, too. I know how joyful and how frightened I was about having two — the question I asked myself over and over, the one nobody prepares you for. Will I still love my daughter the same? Will I be able to love this baby as much as I love her? I know that we waited until the moment he was born to find out, and that a midwife said congratulations, it’s a boy, and I know exactly what that felt like. He barely cried. I loved him immediately. Completely. The question I’d been carrying for nine months answered itself in less than a second.

And I know his curls, bouncing in the air when he jumps for joy playing golf. And I know that for a long time, every single time we drove past the grocery store, he called it ABC. It’s H-E-B. He never once got it right. It was always ABC, said with complete confidence, pointed at out the car window. Then a little while ago, we drove past, and he said H-E-B. Correctly. Just like that. And I caught it. I heard it happen — the first time he ever said it right. And instead of being proud, I felt something go out of me, because I already missed the ABC. I’d heard the last one without knowing, and now I knew. With his sister’s apita, I never noticed the last time. With him, I noticed. It didn’t help at all.

He won’t remember that either. He won’t remember that watching him and his sister grow up is the greatest gift and joy of my entire life.

They’ll know me mostly as their mother. As Mama. They won’t know the girl I was before them. The sad and brave little girl. The one who stood there quietly while the other kids laughed the first time she tried to speak English. The carefree spirit, the risk-taker, the dreamer. The bad decisions. The big dreams.

A whole life that didn’t have them in it yet. They won’t remember the first version of me. They’ll never meet the first chapters.

And I won’t get to meet the last version of them.

I won’t see my daughter grow very old. I won’t know what her hands look like at seventy-five. I won’t know which parts of me she still carries by then, or which ones she put down. I won’t know what my son’s wrinkles look like when he’s a grandfather. I won’t see how their grey hair shines — silver with everything life has taught them by then, all the lessons I won’t be there for.

If I am lucky, they will bury me. I hate that those words can sit together like that — if I am lucky and they will bury me — in such terrible harmony. But that is what lucky means here. It would mean I got to go first. Before I ever had to learn how to live in a world without either of them. As it should be.

My daughter and my son will know my ending, and I knew their beginning. And somewhere between the two we get a little life together. Long enough to know some version of each other. Never long enough to know the whole story.

That’s the part I can’t get past. We are a short chapter in our children’s lives. A glimpse. A flutter. A blink. So small against the whole span of a life. And so achingly beautiful.

There is one thing that makes it bearable. They will have each other.

When I’m gone — when they’ve done the lucky, terrible thing and buried their mother — they won’t be alone in it. There will be one other person on earth who remembers the same kitchen. The same burrow of cushions. The same mother saying I love you out loud more times a day than anybody needed.

I know what that’s worth. I have a sister. She was carried into the same house I was, and she’s the only other person alive who remembers it from the inside, and there is no one on earth I’d rather have beside me in the worst room of my life.

My children will have that. It’s the only real comfort I’ve found in any of this. That’s what makes it bearable. They will have each other.

I don’t have any advice attached to this. I’m not going to tell anyone what to do with their afternoon. I only know that I’ve started looking harder. At the curls. At the wrong words said in the right voice. At a four-year-old asking for apita one of the last times she’ll ever ask for it, without either of us knowing it’s one of the last times. At a little boy pointing out the car window at the grocery store and calling it ABC, right up until the day he didn’t. At a girl with a knife and a piece of fruit, who used to be afraid of cutting herself.

None of it is coming back.

That’s the whole reason to look.

And what a thing — what an unreasonably beautiful thing — to get to witness both of them.

Con cariño, Abril