She is Twenty Seven

1997.  

On a warm July morning I woke early, my two little girls still lay fast asleep in their bunk-beds tangled in their blankets while the air conditioning hummed away chasing off the humid air of Summer.  I peeked in at them as I walked past their bedroom door and wished for a fleeting moment, that I could harness the lazy carefree days of childhood summers and make them mine again.

Before I swung my feet to the floor and grabbed my journal that morning I lay in bed watching the shadow of a locust branch fluttering outside my window in the early breeze, beckoning me outdoors. My journal, or rather, Hannah's journal awaited me.  I neglected it already too long, and time never slowed down.  I knew too many days had passed since I sat and wrote to her, or to the future her that in those years I could not even imagine.

I never knew exactly what to say to her, but I tried to write often.  I wrote about the little girl with a scruffy voice who sang Jesus Loves Me in the back seat of the car.  I wrote about her angry tirades about homework, and how unfair it was that six-year-old children weren't allowed to drive.  I wrote to her about my own life, my struggles and faltering faith.  That morning I felt heavy, heavy like a dark Summer thundercloud, ready for my wringing-out, only no one else existed on whom I could rain down my darkness, my confusion or grief.

I wrote to her about who I was then and who I thought I wanted to become.  At twenty-seven I stood on the threshold of something I couldn't understand until I lived it.  I felt my transformation coming.  I feared it and yearned for it all the same.  I believed Motherhood gave me all the purpose I needed, but I knew life had more to offer than Sunday School and choir practice, Christmas plays and PTA.  

A few years ago I told a friend, "I think I decided at 27 who I wanted to be."  I didn't know it though, at 27.   I just thought I was losing my mind, putting everything I loved at risk just to see what lay past the lines drawn around me by my religion, disguised as faith.

Sometimes people ask me if I would change anything about my life.  If I could go back to that morning, sitting in the sun by my back porch while my babies slept inside and start life all over again from that moment, I doubt if I'd change a thing.  I took my hard knocks much later in life than most people do.  They sent me reeling a few times, wondering if I could even make it over the next hump.  I doubted myself as a mother, as a woman, as a human.  I searched for things I was never meant to find or keep.  I lived with defeat as a companion, but somehow always kept victory in my heart.  Days came and went, when I just gave up, surrendered to whatever ill came my way.  Somehow another dawn would renew me and give me strength to just keep putting one foot in front of another.

That dawn always shone out from the faces of my girls.  No matter what hard life-lessons got thrown my way, they kept me upright.  They made me, me.

That little six-year old girl I sat and wrote to in my journal all those years ago just celebrated her twenty seventh birthday.  I think about who she is now, gentle, kind, courageous, determined.  I think about all the years in between that July morning and today, all the things she learned, all the dreams she chased, all the love she got and gave and even lost between then and now, those things served her well.  They built a beautiful woman, ready to take on the world.  

She is a mother, a friend, a scholar, a dreamer still.  I doubt if she knows it, but she's standing on the threshold of an amazing life. She's on her way to becoming who she wants to be.

She's nothing less than miraculous, considering the flawed and childish mother to whom she was born.  I grew up with her in many ways, she taught me more than I could ever dream of teaching her.  

She created me, or at least the me I eventually became.  My first girl, my world, carried along with me through time, two lives so intertwined yet so different.  

Twenty-seven.  Who knew I would still be here to see the day.

I'm so grateful for it and for her.  

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