I have had a seemingly life long desire to be needed. I’ve always felt loved. I’ve always felt important to people. But to someone, I wanted to be absolutely and totally needed. To be irreplaceable.
And I’ve written how Goosie gave me that gift during her first year. All she wanted was me. She wouldn’t have anyone else for any reason, and there are multiple people who can attest to that. But as she has aged, she has grown out of that, and now she’s pretty content being with whomever is with her at the moment. She still needs me to calm her down sometimes, but her independence is growing.
And just as this is happening, I have started to notice a difference in Magoo. When she was an infant, she was a daddy’s girl through and through. If he was in the room, she wanted absolutely nothing to do with me. I still remember the day she had eye surgery. She was coming out of the anesthesia and was screaming her poor little head off, and I reached for her, and she would not let me take her. She just wanted Daddy. Of course, I handed her right over because I wanted for her to feel safe more than I needed to be that person for her, but it’s six years later, and I can still feel the sting of the tears in my eyes.
But times have changed since then, and Magoo has changed so much in the last six months. Six months or so ago, she was still a little girl. She had her own preferences and interests, and she would assert her independence, but she was still nestled totally within our family. She would go to school and play dates and sports classes, but her world was small. It was us.
And now things are starting to change. She’s more involved with school since she went five days a week to kindergarten. She’s going to play dates on her own, and she’s going to summer day camp in a couple of weeks. Next year, she’ll be in school all day which means she’ll be eating lunch there and spending about as many awake hours at school as at home.
She’s starting to identify with the girls at school. She teaches me games and songs they teach her. They have their favorite toys and activities. Her world is more than her family, and that’s a beautiful thing.
But I think she senses this on some level, and I think that’s perhaps why she has been so insistent on being with me. She no longer naps, so she considers those nap time hours, Magoo and Mommy time. If TJ takes the girls to the store, she asks to stay home with me. If I have a hobby, she wants to learn it. If I have an opinion, she wants to share it. She brags about me to her friends. We have inside jokes.
She needs me. But she needs me now in a different way than Goosie needed me then. Goosie needed my physical presence where Magoo needs the actual me. She craves my attention and my approval and my comfort and my support and my love.
And that is totally awesome. And it is absolutely terrifying.
With Goosie, I couldn’t go that wrong. I just needed to be there for her. With milk and a cuddle and possibly a lullaby.
With Magoo, she is looking to me to show her how to be in today’s world. And that sounds crazy because I haven’t figured it out yet.
I try to lead by example, but I am fallible. Very fallible. And I try to remember that my failures are opportunities to teach her how to ask for forgiveness and how to give herself forgiveness. But those things are really hard for me, and as such, I find myself stumbling through.
I see my strengths in her. I see her creativity and her kindness and her desire to help people.
But I see my weaknesses. My insecurities, my impulsiveness, my anxiety and my depression, andI pray those don’t get imprinted onto her although I know that they have possible fertile soil in her.
And I guess it’s THE struggle of parenthood — how do we teach the good and mitigate the bad when we ourselves are such a strong mixture of both.
And I guess that’s also the answer as well. We don’t. We are imperfect and they will be imperfect and that’s just the big old circle of life.
But that is so hard to come to terms with when I look down and I see her big blue eyes starting up at me as she is wearing her long brown skirt because it reminds her of the ones I wear, and she’s wearing the winter hat I knitted and the ruffle scarf I knitted all in the middle of June. As she just wants to cuddle on my lap and read with me because she craves the closeness. As she “has a talk” with me in the morning because she hears the television at night, and she worries that my brain might grow dull because I’m watching too much television and not reading enough at night.
Her love is so pure. Her respect freely given. Her motives so unbelievably innocent that it breaks my heart. I know I will do my best by her, but I know no one’s best is perfect. And I so very want to be perfect for her.
But I guess that can be my gift for her. The gift of knowing that the person she most looks up to is imperfect. And maybe through that she will find grace to handle her own imperfections. And so maybe in the end, imperfect is perfect.
I don’t really know. I don’t really have any answers. I just have a desire to do and be everything that she needs. Because as any mother knows, the love that swells in our hearts can move mountains, but sometimes it can’t move our own weaknesses.
All those years I longed to be needed. And now I am so very needed. I just pray every single day that I live up to that honor.