"Kay, This One's For Gabby

I gleaned the title of today's blog from the introduction to Israel Kamakawiwo'ole’s haunting rendition of Over the Rainbow from his album Facing Future. If you are the last person left on this earth who doesn’t own a recording of this song, I suggest you get it, now. You’ll thank me. Anyhoo, today is my daughter Gabby’s birthday (coincidentally it is also Israel’s) and so, “This one’s for Gabby”.

As the title and first paragraph and almost all of my blogs would indicate, I am profoundly moved by music. In fact, and I think I have mentioned this before, I would like my life to be a musical. This week, in the days leading up to my daughter’s fourteenth birthday, that musical would be Mama Mia and the song "Slipping Through My Fingers". Cut to scene of mother singing plaintively,

Schoolbag in hand, she leaves home in the early morning

Waving goodbye with an absent-minded smile

I watch her go with a surge of that well-known sadness

And I have to sit down for a while

The feeling that I'm losing her forever

And without really entering her world

I'm glad whenever I can share her laughter

That funny little girl

I might continue copying these lyrics if it wasn’t so difficult to type through the tears. And I think you get the idea. I first fell in love with this song when I went to see the play Mama Mia in 2000. My girls were only four and two years old at the time but I immediately latched on, with a sort of maniacal sentimentality, to the feeling of desperate longing of the mother who had watched her daughter grow away. I told my sister, who was kindly babysitting my daughters (one of whom had a nasty fever that night) about the song when I got home from the play. I had gotten a cd and played it for her and cried. Over the years it has become a running joke, a sort of code word to halt a slide into obsessing over the passage of time. She’ll belt out “Slipping through my fingaaaaaas.” in a vaudevillian mockery of my maudlin hysteria and somehow that helps bring me back from the brink of said hysteria.

Fast forward ten years and my four year old is, indeed, slipping through my fingers. I remember being fourteen. I’m not ready for her to negotiate her first kiss via Truth or Dare on the back of a bus to Great Adventure. I’m not ready for her to go to high school. I’m not ready for her start disdaining me and hate the way my breath smells. I’m not ready for her to stop constantly trying to hold hands with me with her sweaty meat paws. I’m not ready.

Slipping through my fingers all the time

I try to capture every minute

The feeling in it

Slipping through my fingers all the time

Do I really see what's in her mind

Each time I think I'm close to knowing

She keeps on growing

Slipping through my fingers all the time

She’s been sick for a week and while it was terrible to worry over each successive day of over 102 fever, there was something horribly comforting about having her with me on the couch for an entire week. The week before, her sister was home with a similar virus and I greedily devoured that time as well. For two weeks, I got to hold back the advancing tide of time and separation with each of my girls. Perhaps writing it out loud sounds weird. It is a weird paradox. So weird that when I was watching the Sixth Sense with my kids the other day and we got to the part with the whack-o murdering Munchausen-by-proxy mom, I thought, “maybe that loon started out just wanting to halt time.”

Sleep in our eyes, her and me at the breakfast table

Barely awake, I let precious time go by

Then when she's gone there's that odd melancholy feeling

And a sense of guilt I can't deny

What happened to the wonderful adventures

The places I had planned for us to go

(Slipping through my fingers all the time)

Well, some of that we did but most we didn't

And why I just don't know

I almost deleted that last bit about the Munchausen lady because nobody wants to be even remotely associated with a lunatic. But I believe the fleeting seed of a thought conveys the struggle between wanting to hold on to your kids forever and rejoicing in watching them blossom into incredible, strong, talented, beautiful adults. While my most selfish nature might want to keep Gabriella to myself, the part of me that loves her most can’t wait to see the places she’ll go, the people she’ll meet, the wonders she’ll do.

So, happy Birthday my love, enjoy being fourteen and this one’s for you Gabby: