Ten Years!

Somehow my Malia has turned 10. Ten feels big. Ten feels different. Ten feels like change and growth and the beginning of something new. She's excited about the double digits and her newly published book. I'm looking through the last 10 years like pages in a photo album. She's growing and changing and being. I'm trying (and mostly not quite making it) so hard to stay a step ahead of her. A step? At this point it's like a .001 of a second. Mostly likely she'll pass me by the end of the day. Today. She is stepping out of her child self and into a whole new level. She's looking at the world with her own eyes and her own thoughts and her own ideas. I'm happy to just be watching her for a moment. She's normally a pretty even keeled person. It's hard to rile her up about much of anything, but when the box arrived with 20 copies of her very own book, she was excited. As she sat there, touching each book, flipping through page after page of her own words, I was over come. At first, sure, it was pride that washed over me. Pride that she worked day after day after day on this work and stuck with the story for an entire year. Next came relief that I was able to help her make it all happen. Trying to find a book printer that would do it justice and not drain her college fund (although maybe if she starts selling these books, she'll pay her own way! Ha!) was not as easy as I wanted it to be. But we got it all done and it's printed and totally fitting that she is releasing it out into the world on her 10th birthday. I have always wanted to help my kids feel like they could do anything they put their minds to and I am pretty sure Malia is feeling that right now. I only wish I could bottle this moment and keep it for her struggles ahead. Sigh, a mother's view.

Through this entire process, Malia has been such an inspiration to me as well. She plugs away at the keyboard (yup, the whole thing was typed into a Google Doc) hour after hour. She sometimes gasps in the middle of dinner, or a walk, or as we cuddle up each night before sleep. Her eyes get big and she says, "Just a minute, Mom, I need to write something down." Or "Wait, I just got an idea flood...can you hand me that pencil, please?" This is her thing. This is who she is and what she does constantly. Her published story started out slowly, certainly a short story, talked about with her good friends at recess, lunch and every spare moment at school. Then, it grew and changed and grew and then changed again. I finally enlisted the help of her former teacher to help edit the thing as I didn't feel I was the right person to help her. It changed some more and got a little more streamlined. And still, hour after hour she pounded away at the keyboard and found out more things about her characters. She still worked on other stories as well, but her focus never wavered. I finally found a website that would print it, so we ordered one and she edited the whole thing again. Then she had me read it out loud to her as she needed to make sure it sounded good too. Finally, the last edits were made and box with 20 copies arrived last night. Ever so gently cutting the tape across the top of the box, she carefully opened it without any damage to the treasure inside. Her baby. Her creativity and all of her hard work. This girl is persistent to the nth degree. And now she has a book!

The most amazing thing about this entire process, the thing that has most fascinated me anyway, is that she never once asked if anyone else would like it. She's giving out copies like water, signing them with incredible pride without batting an eye. I want that kind of ... what, naivete? Panache? Confidence? Whatever it is, I want it. The other interesting thing I felt today was a little bit of my own childhood through my mother's eyes. I felt her big smile and shining eyes as Malia handed the book to her teacher this morning. Sometimes this mother's pride is a moment I feel more connected to her, as a mother, and some of those moments I feel like I understand her on a much deeper level. This motherhood thing, 10 years in, is pretty great.