The Book of Ruth Chapter 22: Let the sun shine.

Ruth is almost finished her first year of school. It really does feel like yesterday I was just packing her knapsack for the first time. She is suddenly tall. Her hair is unkempt no matter how much I brush or braid it. It is wild and free. As is she. It shines in the sunlight as she runs from me at the park. “No, really Ruth, you have to come home. I mean it! Nowwww.” Being firm has never come naturally to me. But I play the part of competent mom as our wills battle in the late-day sun. We both admit defeat and race each other home. ‘I WIN!” she screams as she bounds up the stairs. She is relentless.

When I drop her off at the kinder gate at school she looks around the yard for her pals. There’s always this hair of a moment before she runs into the yard. Where she remembers she wants a hug. Or that she always gives me a hug. I’m not sure if it’s necessity or routine. But I know I sure like our little ritual before she bounds away. “Be kind to yourself and others”, I scream in her general direction as she waddles in with her giant backpack hanging from her shoulders. It’s a reminder to me as much as for her. She never looks back anymore. I cried about this fact all the way home one day. Averting my eyes from any and all other parents lest I be discovered as this insane. I think about daycare, how she would hang off my body. Screaming. Begging me to stay. I don’t miss those drop offs. But sometimes I wonder what it was all about. All that drama.

She makes up stories. Long ones. She’s getting good at dialogue. She is getting better at writing her name. She still mixes up Us and Hs because they are both in her name. Because they are of her, it doesn’t matter which one’s which. They comprise the name Ruth so she is the expert on them. I get annoyed and laugh at the u and h of it all. She likes school but has a hard time focusing. She is sadly, still illiterate. She is not a literacy prodigy. Oh well, she’ll have to muddle through life like the rest of us formerly illiterate 4 year olds. She’ll get through. Somehow.

She is evolving quickly. She knows how to charm us. Manipulate us. And negotiate with the best of them. She is so raw and impulsive. I try not to tamp down these parts of her too much. We want her to keep a bit of fight. It will serve her well.

She’s very social. Now, she notices when she’s left out. Before she would scream and try to control others with her sad, lonely feelings by hollering. She is learning new tricks. She will coyly sidle up beside the group and throw out a ‘hey’ to get their attention. If she’s ignored, she’ll repeat it before walking away. My heart breaks a little every time. Hers does not. She’s heartier than me. These things don’t bother us in the same way. I keep my aching to myself. I don’t make my story her story. Or, at least I try not to. She sees another little girl from her class. She runs up to Ruth and the two of them giggle and run away together. She is so fast. The little girl trips and falls. Ruth asks her if she is okay. She is and they continue on.

She is entering girlhood. I have long been in womanhood and seem to be entering cronehood. The pigment has left my hair strands as grey becomes the dominant colour and collagen disappears with a poof! I wake exhausted and annoyed. I’m convinced it’s my lack of stamina or general inferiority.

I start eating more apples. I drink less caffeine. Which doesn’t help with the crankiness. I decide to walk. A lot. My walking is more like running slowly while keeping both feet on the ground. I refuse to take flight and truly pound the pavement. Maybe I will finally run one of these days. Let myself be off to the races. Let the feeling of being chased by a bear fully manifest.

I feel flickers of rage that were never there before. I take it on as a moral thing. I resolve to breathe deeper and more fully. To pause and let myself feel more and react less. I envision a woman made of stone. Like Medusa caught mid hiss. Whose face got stuck ‘like that’. A pedestal for all others to look upon and project their conclusions onto.  

I don’t know what I’m doing. One afternoon I stand in the middle of my backyard with the adorable orange, crumbling shed and untended garden and let the sun kiss my sun-screened face. I ignore the class action suit against Supergoop. I like pretending it works and I like how it feels as it glides onto my face. Let me have this one thing I whisper to myself. I turn to the sun’s rays like a flower who has lost some petals but is still hanging on. I have not withered. I will not. I will be a dried flower, someday. Preserved in a vase forever. But not today.

I rest beside Ruth until she falls asleep. I thought we’d be done with this by now. I read something on Threads. Women fighting each other over the right way to put their child to sleep. One mom says she likes these tender moments with her child at the end of the day. Another tells her to ‘get a life’. That being needed is a diminishing return and an unfair expectation to place on a child. ‘You wanting to be needed and to feel important is really not your child’s problem, lady’. I side with both of them. What a lose lose proposition. We are all right and so wrong. ‘How do I get out of here?’ I think in the dim glow of her unicorn night-light lighted room as she repeats ‘mummymummymummymummymummymummymummy’ until she quite literally falls asleep mid-mummy.

Some day she will slam a door in my face and tell me to leave her alone. I let that day scare me into this hostage situation at bedtime. Tomorrow terrorizes today every day. I wonder if I feel needed or controlled? I’m too tired to figure it out.

She crawls into our bed sometime between 1-4 am 50% of the time. I consider this a win.

She plays T-ball. Correction, she goes to T-ball. My sweet mom friend tells me our society is crazy and our expectations for 4 year olds is….off. I wonder why I enrolled my story-telling, pretend-playing child into a sport she doesn’t have the attention span for. I want her to know how to be on a team. To value teamwork. Something I still don’t know how to do. Somehow over the years groups form around me and I watch their decades of friendship play out on Instagram. Then I remember my idea of joy is an hour and a half walk by myself. I want everything every way.

I want it every way for Ruth as well. I want her to be bold and compliant. Sporty and creative. Bold but accommodating. Funny but not controversial. No wonder she’s over-tired.

I look at her again with clear eyes. She is beautiful. She is rude. She is learning. She is inexorable. She is stubborn. She is generous. She is kind. She is diabolical. She is thoughts and feelings and an entire inner world I’ll never know. She is her own.

These first days of spring-summer vibrate with possibility. Everything feels slow and like it’s slipping through my fingers. I try to capture sunlight in a bottle as it streams through our window, over Brisket’s allergy-riddled nose, across the scratched hardwood of our imperfect house and onto its imperfect inhabitants who are lucky enough to sit in the warmth of a sun who embraces us all.