So, by the time your kid gets to be 12, there are some stories you just tell by rote, because those are the ones that seem to define your child.
Squishy has always been my dessert baby.
She is beautiful, smart, easy to be around, and almost unbearably sweet.
She grew up in the back of the car, listening to me talk to the older kids as they graduated to the front seat. First it was Big T, and we had very complex discussions about literature.
Then it was Chicken, and we laughed a lot about books, people, happy moments–life.
ZoomBoy is captain DJ–he has very specific tastes in music, including Weird Al Yankovich, Dropkick Murphy’s and AC/DC.
Squishy gives me book reports, talks about teachers and nice things that happens at school, and is my last hope for American Musical Theater. (At present she A. hates “angry Irish guys screaming” and B. thinks Something Rotten is hysterical, so I have hopes.)
She’s clever and intuitive and undeniably brilliant. Her school test scores are really very impressive considering her father and I have spent her entire life telling her that the test isn’t as important as how much she’s learned.
She’s learned a lot–the tests are a cakewalk and she loves taking them. (So does ZoomBoy–don’t hate on them, it’s probably my fault.)
Yes, she IS aware that her hair is gorgeous and stunning and beautiful–thank you. She appreciates your awe and wonder and while she may someday cut it, she has to admit–the praise is lovely to hear and she doesn’t want it to go away.
She is also aware that her blue eyes are quite pretty. She’s the only one in the family with blue eyes you know–she got them in particular, because, you know, Squishy.
When I told her that her shadow in the picture with the shawl looks like a unicorn, she laughed. When she read the John Oliver book, Marlon Bundo (the better bunny book!) she thought it was sweet–and she’s grown up with her father and I watching politics and she agrees that the stink bug is VERY STINKY indeed.
Her whole life she has seen the poetry in the story, the sweetness in the bitter, the brightness in the dark.
Her vocabulary is extraordinary, and she uses it to communicate with her family, because we are her favorite thing.
She loves to draw.
She loves to read.
She loves–in her words–“old people’s movies”. This includes, by the way, Sixteen Candles, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and The Thin Man movies.
And although this whole post is written with a little hyperbole, and with the full knowledge that one’s own children are always the prettiest, the whole kernel of truth here is this:
She is my Squishy and she is twelve today, and that time… it flew by like a breath. She’s a delight and a joy and sometimes after a really shitty day her hug is all the keeps me from the worst part of myself.
Mate and I ask ourselves, every single day, what good we could have done to deserve all of our children. With Squishy we have been forced to accept the grace of the Goddess in general.
Nobody is good enough to “deserve” her. We just have to accept her for the loveliness she is.
