She’s mid-childhood. I’m midlife.

I keep thinking about how slowly we drove her home from the hospital. Were people honking at us as we rolled down Telegraph Avenue at 10 mph? To our astonishment, the medical professionals had released her into our care. We had gone to great lengths to make sure the carseat was properly installed. She was showing no signs of distress. But somehow I remember feeling like we couldn’t be gentle enough, couldn’t go slowly enough. It wasn’t that we thought she would break exactly, or even that she was fragile; it felt like our gingerly speed was more about us—like we were going so slowly because we were trying to give our metaphysical selves time to catch up to this new world we had just birthed.

As my first baby turns 10 years old next week, I think I’m right back there emotionally. I’m slowly, gently moving through this moment, as tender in many ways as I felt after first giving birth.

The other night she shared some hard feelings at the dinner table and when I offered my lap, she readily sat down on it, turning inward toward my chest and collapsing into the home of me. Her impossibly long legs dangled down, her white Doc Martins skimming the floor. It used to be that I could envelop her with my love; now I have to wrap it around her, more like I do with her dad or a dear friend. The physicality mirrors the emotionality—that she is still able to find solace in my love, but that it is slowly, slowly becoming more like accompaniment than absorption.

Ten feels—at least in our house, in our girl—like the most beautiful of liminal moments. Ten isn’t a new world. It’s between worlds. She is obsessed with Taylor Swift, a make-up artist reality show called Glow Up, and other teenage-feeling things. But she also plays dolls, gives me a huge hug every single morning, and has me braid her hair every night. She is perfecting her eye roll (this morning, it was in full form as I played “Let’s Get Physical” by Olive Newton-John for the girls, a necessary education, don’t you think?), but also still basks in her parents’ attention. The other day, her dad, John, and I took her to a museum—just the three of us—and it was like nothing on earth could disturb her high; she had art, her doting dad, and her adoring mom, and not a single little weirdo or work call competing for our attention. It is her ten-year-old nirvana.

I have never been clearer that her inner life is so different than mine. Sometimes this is bliss. One of the most surprising rewards of these ten years has been learning from how she moves through the world—listening to her desires and articulating her preferences. She has mentored me just by being herself, in the art of embracing your own solitude, being loving but not losing oneself, and taking great pleasure in making things.

Sometimes this is hell. Witnessing her suffer and problem solve in her own way at her own timetable can leave me absolutely bereft. I believe so strongly in the blessing of struggle, and of course, it doesn’t make it any easier to watch her do it. Calibrating the right amount of intervention is a mindfuck for me.

It’s also taught me a lot about standing back. John, her dad, is built more like her than I am in many ways and, though I fancy myself the emotionally sophisticated and verbal one, he has vital insights into what she’s actually feeling and what portals out of those feelings exist for her. I wrap her in my unconditional love, listen to his tender truths about their shared inner architecture, and try to stay quiet.

Quiet! Another of her biggest gifts to me. We have spent so much time together in these ten years, including the unexpected hours and days and months of the pandemic, and we have shared so much loving silence. I remember the exact moment when we were walking down the block together, hand in hand, and I was chattering on mindlessly about something and realized that I was still in new parenting mode. I had so internalized that parenting advice about constantly speaking to babies so that they develop language skills, that I’d failed to update my operating system when she was no longer a baby. She likes chatting, but not too much, and not unless it’s about something interesting like misunderstood sharks or song lyrics or how hard it is to work with tulle.

When we were driving home so slowly that day, I never could have predicted any of this—that, ironically, my firstborn would gift me with nourishing, companionable quiet, and return me to my love of solitude and art, and speak an emotional language so foreign to me it would humble me in all the right ways. I could have never imagined what it would be like to have her legs dangle down and her Docs hit the floor. I could have never understood then, how that strange seed of her face that existed on day one would unfold—like an endlessly deconstructing piece of origami art—on year ten; she is so unbelievably beautiful to me.

I could have never, not in a million years, prepared for any of it. It’s been a moment by moment meeting. Meeting her. Meeting my mother self and re-meeting my self self. Re-meeting her dad. Meeting her again as she stretches and thrashes and sings into new versions of who she can and wants to be. And it’s gone so fast, just like they say. And some days have been so slow—in both delicious and terrible ways. And lately, they all feel a little bit sacred as I see the long horizon laid out before us.

She’s mid-childhood. I’m midlife. We’re moving through this threshold together, hand in hand, hair always on the edge of tangle, hearts beating in rhythm even if our brains are very different instruments, welcoming the moment with appropriate gratitude, terror, and mutual admiration.