Watching children grow up is a bittersweet time

St. Petersburg Times (Florida)

January 19, 1988

BEVERLY BECKHAM

It is too eerily familiar. The exasperation in her voice. The long sighs. The shifting attitude.

"Do you think this looks nice?" she asked me this morning.

She was scrutinizing herself in the mirror, inspecting her white stretch pants and her extra, extra large white T-shirt that she'd covered with a complimenting white sweat shirt that came to her waist.

Since the T-shirt was six inches too long and the stretch pants were six inches too short, she looked a little weird to me, like a sister Casper might have had and disowned.

So I said so.

"I've seen you look better," I replied, which seemed a rather charitable comment considering the hour and the outfit. But I should have known better. I'm a veteran of this. It wasn't that long ago that my older daughter stood in front of the same mirror asking the same questions. And I learned then, after the 10th, the 20th confrontation: Never tell the truth. Never be totally honest. A soon-to-be 11-year-old isn't looking for wisdom. She's looking for approval and permission to grow.

But I forgot. For this child I still see as a little girl. My baby, the one in whose eyes I never have been able to do anything wrong.

"You're my best friend, Mommy," she has said practically every day of her life. "I love you the bestest and the widest." Always, I have been her first choice. "Want to go to the movies? Want to go for a walk? Will you watch TV with me?"

But now there is ambivalence. "I love you, Mommy," is followed by what sounds like criticism but is only recognition on her part that I am not all she thought I was, that I am not perfect.

"Do we have to listen to that music?" she groans, as her brother and sister did before her. "How can you like it?" she asks, wondering why she doesn't anymore.

"You can listen," she says, the next time we're in the car, trying to slip into that smaller person who liked what I liked. Trying to please, to go back, not forward, to hang on to what she knows.

"You want to go to the movies tonight?" I will ask at breakfast, and last month she would have said, "Sure. Can I take a friend?" Now the reply is, "What movie do you want to see? Can't we go to this one instead?"

She doesn't mean to be mean. "I'm not growing up on purpose. I'm not doing it to hurt you," another child said to another mother not too long ago. Given the choice, this child, as well as my own, would have stayed small, because small is safe and secure and familiar.

But growth is part of life. Change is natural. So I watch my daughter advance, then retreat, eight one moment, 13 the next.

This morning she clumped into her room, removed the T-shirt and appeared before me in the same pants and sweat shirt. "You look nice," I said, ignoring her unwashed face and the hair that had escaped from her pony tail. I took her in my arms and hugged her, and felt her body blooming even in that touch.

My little girl. She does cartwheels across the mall one moment, spiraling away like a pinwheel in a breeze, then in the next instant tells me not to do anything that would make people look at her.

Will I get through this? Sure I will. I have it easy. All I have to do is watch. She's the one who has to change.

She's the one who, every morning, looks in the mirror and sees a different her. She's taller today than she was yesterday. The tap shoes we bought in September don't fit her now. Even her looks are changing, her eyes widening, her teeth finally fitting her face.

You're my little caterpillar, I tell her as she passes by.

"What does that mean?" she says, not in the sweet curious tone she always used to use, but in a breath that hides a sigh.

"It means you're turning into a butterfly right before my eyes."

"Right, Mom," she says, dismissing me.

But a few minutes later she returns, plunks herself on the bed, hugs her knees and in the child's voice I recognize, whispers, "Do you really think so, Mom?"