This morning, a battle to get my almost-two-year-old to drink her bottle of morning milk - instead of only cradling it in the crook of her arm and declaring “Hold! Hold!”, ended in her laying flat across my bed. The bottle crashed into her lips, and the shock of milk seemed to make her instinctively begin drinking, and she lay there, holding her bottle backwards with one hand (no clue) while staring up at me with big, curious hazel eyes. After a moment her right hand snuck into mine and grasped softly. And still she kept staring.
It’s a funny thing, to stare into another person’s eyes. I don’t know if there is anyone else in the world that I can do this with, not even my husband. But with my daughter it’s different. I think about why, as I hold her gaze with mine. Why do I feel no awkwardness, no embarrassment? Perhaps there isn’t any time to, when you’re silently attempting to transmit all the love and security, all the hard-won knowledge, all the gaps you’ve had to fill by yourself in your own soul. It strikes me then that every person has a skeleton key that fits only for them, that unlocks their own version of a perfect, untroubled, happy life. My parents gave me a key in the shape of the one they had needed as children, which didn’t quite fit the lock inside of me. And I in turn can only give my daughter my own key.
I suppose I see in her blank slate a part of myself - especially now, because while she certainly has her own personality and it’s becoming clearer every day that she is fiercer, braver, louder than I have ever been - she still cannot tell me exactly the shape and size of the love she needs. The great irony is that we just don’t know the thing we are missing until we have the words to form around it, and this process of knowing finishes - in all likelihood - sometime around the moment we die. So for now I can’t help seeing my own self, my own self as a child in her wide open eyes. And I tell her, silently, and with words words whispered into her hair as she sits on my lap in the evening and leafs furiously through book after book: I love you. I will always love you. There is nothing you could ever do to make me not love you. If you’re sad I’ll still love you. If you’re broken I’ll still love you. You will never be too much because you are mine - and how incredibly, impossibly, inconceivable lucky I am to be yours.