My daughter has just learned the word, twinkle. She whispers Twinkle Twinkle Little Star in my ear at night, when I carry her upstairs to her bath, pleased with herself that she knows all the lyrics. On our way to preschool, I put on one of my favorite songs by FKJ in the car. I love the intro, how the piano triplets sound like a ballet dancer turning across a stage. My daughter loves it too. Her eyes light up. “Twinkling,” she says. “The music is twinkling!”
I think of this after I drop her off at school and come home to find my kitchen washed in the honeyed light of California fall, parts of it flickering, moving like light on water as a gentle wind rearranges the leaves on our oak tree outside. Twinkling, I think. It makes me smile to myself. About her delight in the music. About her unexpected application of a word we typically use for visual phenomena (light filtered through trees, etc.).
One of the great joys of three-year-olds, I’m learning, is their fluidity with communication. They have just enough language to get their point across, even if they don’t have all the right words. And they fill in those gaps with creative amalgamations of what they do know. Like how my daughter calls small pieces of anything, “sprinkles.” Shredded coconut? Sprinkles. Grated cheese? Sprinkles.
I text a friend about the twinkling and my wonder at the not-so-small phenomenon of a child’s rapidly developing language skills. My community is small and spread out, so text messages and FaceTime are what I have these days. They’re how I often share my child with other people who care about her. And honestly, they’re also how I remember.
On days that seem short on ease and long on restless naps, tantrums, and hot tears running over newly-dried ones, it feels like a lot just to remember. What did my child say? Learn? Observe today? What I’m really asking: how can I hold all this forever? How can I keep it safe, wrap it in tissue for my daughter to one day open it and learn how her story began, how she learned to be with the world, how she grew into her humanity, navigating its delight and pain and strangeness, and how much love we found through it all, together?
It feels like a lot: a lot to hold, a lot happening all at once, passing by too quickly as she sheds layers of herself, revealing new ones. Sometimes I’m hard on myself for getting overwhelmed by the responsibility of carrying all these memories, the weight of them—even (especially?) the good ones. Shouldn’t it be all joy? But I realize that’s an old story: the unadulterated bliss of motherhood. There’s joy in the work. But it’s still work: the witnessing, the showing up, the interest-taking in my child’s life.
Angels Garbes sums it up perfectly in her newest book, Essential Labor. “How is this anything but unequivocally right? To be part of the humbling and heroic, the smallest details that comprise a child’s big, wondrous life—that is our duty of care.” In other words, this IS the job, this business of witnessing. It’s so much more of the labor of parenting, so much more important than we ever give it credit for.
When I keep that in mind, I’m less hard on myself for getting overwhelmed, for forgetting about a small idiosyncrasy my daughter has since grown out of, for letting a memory of something funny or endearing slip out of my head at the end of a long day. If my job is to be a witness to my child’s life, then I’m already doing that, everyday.
