Lucy looked at me, straight on, full eye contact. That happens so little that I sat up straighter.
Her eyes bright, her body calm, Lucy looked at me and said, “Enough, Mom.”
My heart lifted along with my shoulders. I’d never heard this before.
We entered a new age.
Our darling girl, Lucy, is turning 14 tomorrow.
Fourteen.
If you have been reading my work since the early days of Gluten-Free Girl, you may remember the story of Lucy’s birth. She stopped breathing after she was born. We lived in the NICU for a week, en-terrored the entire time. I don’t think I began breathing freely until she did, on Danny’s birthday, on July 26th, 5 days after she was born. I had demanded they free her from the wires and put her on my chest, so she could hear my heartbeat. The beeping evened to a steady song within 5 minutes of her breathing on me.
Before that, she had been on a breathing tube. Every time they tried to take her off of it, she had stopped breathing.
But she hated that thing. When she was 2 days old, they put soft white cuffs on her tiny wrists. Her arms were kept to the bed. When I asked why, they said she had ripped her breathing tube out of her nose. At 2 days old. I told them I didn’t know that was possible. They hadn’t seen it either.
My girl has always been fierce.
But, like so many girls who enter middle school, she lost some of that fierceness and wavered into “nice.”
I hate nice.
(I wrote about that here. You can read it if you want.)
But it seems that no matter how you wish and show your kids that they don’t have to give into society’s pressures of who they are “supposed” to be, middle school will scuff the edges of your guidelines.
In other words, there’s probably no avoiding it.
And so, Lucy has been becoming more tentative. Not sure of her own opinions. Equivocating.
And trying to fit in.
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