I gotta keep trying.

Welcome to Midnight.

Friday, April 01, 2005

Anxiety or PMS?

It's 1:48 a.m. Last night I was up to nearly 3:30 a.m. I kept thinking about the future. What if we're rejected by Jews for Jesus? What if we're accepted? How are we going to survive that plane ride to San Francisco with Phoenix on our laps? I am so absolutely sleepless!
Tonight I started thinking about Phoenix and how amazingly cute she is. How when she walks she looks like a plumper, hairier, smaller version of Mr. Burns. She sticks her neck out and raises her arms up to her chest and totters along, bouncing off walls and tables and whatever random people are in her line of sight at the time.
All of a sudden I thought, she won't be like this forever. She won't always walk up to me and lay her head on my knee, or chew on my bare toe while I watch Will & Grace, or try to sit on my head when I'm lying on the floor to play with her. But the walking, watching her walk, swelling with pride and bursting with laughter at her clumsy toddler antics, this is what I will miss. And I just started to ache inside. I don't want these images to ever leave my memory. But what if they do? So I told Mike we have to get a video camera. We've already gone over a year with nary a video image of our girl to show for it. We ought to be ashamed of ourselves. But of course we can't get a video camera. Not yet. I suppose we could borrow one. I just have to capture that walk. That insatiable curiosity, that absolute ownership of the world around her. I will miss this baby so much.
So I got out of bed and got on the computer and opened my old Outlook Express e-mail account, so I could look through my old e-mails and pull out the stuff I had written about Phoenix. I don't want to forget anything. But the first 6 weeks aren't there. They must have been on an old computer. I just got so scared that I would forget how she amazes me every day.
Like a few weeks ago my friend Becky gave Phoenix and I a ride to Bible study. Phoenix was in the back seat with Becky's two daughters, Cami and Natalie. Natalie is maybe 7 months younger than Phoenix. And she hates the car seat with a searing evil hatred. She cries the whole time she's in it. So Phoenix is in her own car seat which she does not hate with a searing evil hatred and she is looking at Natalie with such compassion and concern, and she actually holds her hand! And keeps looking at me, like she wants me to tell her what to do to help this poor baby feel better. It was so sweet. Then there was the time she walked by the pastor's baby girl, Elizabeth, and plucked the Nuk right out of her mouth and kept walking, like she had just been given a flyer for a tarot card reading on a street corner. They call her the "Drive-By."
She has many dimensions, my girl, and I pretty much love and adore each of them. Even her rage hits a soft spot in me, and it is hard not to laugh too obviously at her.
I still can't believe she's all mine. I am surprised every morning when she wakes up screaming, still with us, healthy and whole and charged with life. Sometimes I find it hard to believe that God can be this good, when I've believed so many other terrible things about him. That he would give me a gift so priceless and rare and fragile as this baby girl, when I so obviously deserve so much less.

2 comments:

kirk and sarah said...

hey tammy friend,
it's great to be able to read your words again... and i don't think you are undeserving of such an amazing daughter!! love you! sarabellum

beautifulmess said...

don't know why i never thought of this before, but we have a video camera you can borrow. remind me, & i'll bring it to you when i come up next week. & also, i changed my blogger address to suchabeautifulmess.blogger.com.