My daughter is starting first grade tomorrow. She has a bit of a cold, which bothers me tremendously, but that's not the point. The point is, that sometime in the last five years, my baby has grown up. She's a big girl in grade school now. And selfishly, it's making me sad. You know, pretty soon she'll be too big to carry around places. She'll be too tall for her car seat. She'll be too bratty for my sanity. She'll be losing her baby teeth. And she'll be less a "baby" and more a young lady.
I don't know what this means for my sanity at this point, but the baby growing up is messing with my head. It's time for her to remember things well into her life now. I remember stuff from my first grade year: Mrs. Fisher; dinosaur names as spelling words; blisters from swinging on the rings; and one of our playground counselors passing out and falling down during lunch. I feel like ... shit is for real now. There's no messing around anymore. I'm growing a person. I'm nurturing a future woman. She can be anything she wants to be, and I have to help her prepare for that.
It's like my own internal one-to-10 responsibility scale for the person she becomes just shot up to 11. Suddenly, she's not a baby who's around just to learn stuff. She's a little person who needs to be molded, and led in the best direction I can show her. The crushing responsibility of that has recently begun freaking me out.
Of course, I know I'm thinking about it too much. But my baby's growing up so fast, and I'm feeling incredibly irrational about it.
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