Today is my daughter’s eighth birthday. Each time I say the number “eight,” I feel my throat constrict. And yet time continues to roll away, unbothered by my heart’s stirrings. Just yesterday, she was squawking in the bassinet next to me in our first home, in Chicago, Illinois. The March trees outside the window of her nursery were stick figure versions of themselves, while we were full and busy together inside. Emory had such alert eyes, even just a few days old. She was observant, wondrous–just as she is now, and has been at every phase of her young life. Nothing passes her notice. We will be at a restaurant and she’ll lean over and say, “That boy at the table next to us was in my weeklong summer camp three years ago,” or I’ll mention in passing that she used to be prone to carsickness, and she’ll trot out a lucid memory from years ago, remembering the exact moment she got sick in the car, where we were going, what she was wearing, what her father said. When I ask, “How did you remember that?!,” she likes to remind me: “Memory and Emory rhyme!”, as if her way of being was hardwired into her name. Which, I think, it was. Landon and I agonized over her name. We wanted a name that sounded like it belonged to a woman of substance. Landon would ask, “Could you see the letters ‘CEO’ beneath that name in an email signature?” And so we tried: “Emory Shoop, CEO?” and it gelled. Not that being an executive automatically confers “woman of substance” virtues, but that — we wanted her name to feel big enough to hold outsized dreams. And just this year we discovered that her middle name, Lucia, has a profound hidden meaning — that it somehow bears a signature of her spirit, too.
Emory at seven days old
I am sitting here today, torturing myself: did I adequately treasure her at seven years old? With her sardonic humor and wavy hair and teeth growing in too-big? Did I sufficiently soak up the way she sprints off to the school building, her backpack dwarfing her frame? Did I nurture her love of graphic novels and Squishmallows and snap peas and popcorn? Did I stand in the doorway frequently enough to love on the way she sprawls out on her carpet every night, dutifully writing in her journal? Today, and all days, I must remind myself not to worry: I carry all of her ages inside, even the ones from that blurry first fledgling year of motherhood, in which we were both born.
Happy birthday, Emory. I’m lucky to carry every version of you.
Below: Emory’s first year — wow. The trip of a lifetime.
Post Scripts.
+Aren’t we lucky to be children?
+Thoughts on early motherhood.
+So often in motherhood, I am surprised by how emotional I am about the smallest things.