The First Few First Days

Will I take these first day pictures through grade school? Maybe as long as she lives at home? Will I be a 'helicopter mom' who reappears a few days after moving my child into a dorm room (perhaps from my convenient apartment rented just off campus where I will do her laundry and bake her cookies) to make her pose for a first day photo even in her college years. Who knows?

The other day, I turned the TV off before the commentator could begin his story "Is it possible for daughters and mothers to be best friends?" Modern psychology talks about how this relationship is fraught with difficulty. The daughters will give great thought and attention to their fathers walking them up the aisle one day and exactly what song will capture their first dance, but to their moms, they roll their eyes with an expression of "enough already mom!" Will that be me? Who knows.

But for now, she is everything I wished her to be, no more and no less. She is someone that I admire because, in all honestly, she handled the change of today far better than I handled the changes of the last few months. I hope I don't expect too much of her, and yet I hope she knows that I do expect her to continue to do her best.

Today, from across the new classroom in her familiar preschool she said to me "See you later Mom" without even looking up from the 12 pairs of scissors laid out before her on the art table. I watched her for a few minutes as she surveyed the plethora of possibility before her, and then in a moment she looked at me with those dancing eyes and smiled "I said goodbye Mama." That's my daughter.