Mothers and Daughters

A long time ago I had two little boys. The two most wonderful things on the planet and my heart was full to bursting with love for them. When I found I was expecting another baby, everyone told me how I would hopefully get a girl this time. How every woman needs a daughter. I would shake my head and wonder how, when I already had these two beautiful little people in my life, could I possibly wish for anything other than another little boy.

Then I had a daughter.

I read somewhere recently that when, as a woman, they hand you your newborn baby girl, you have just met the person that will be holding your hand on the day you die. She did not eclipse or replace the 3 men I already loved, but she filled our family out, rounded it off, and made us whole.

Sitting at a dinner theater one night, my sons were sitting between us with swords and shields, and my daughter was in the middle in a cone shaped, pink princess hat. I looked across the way at another family. It was a mother, father, and two boys, and she had on the princess hat. She was the princess of the family, where in mine I no longer was. That’s what daughters do for us moms. They bring us to earth, level us, tell us when we are carrying on too much, and remind us that we are human. Just a part of the family equation, not the whole shebang.

Last weekend, deciding far too much testosterone was in the house, my daughter and I decided to take our first Girl’s Day and headed for Hot Springs for a soak in the springs and a massage. We talked and laughed, at very high decibel levels, to be heard over the rap music that she had 94.5 blasting into our car. We were having such a good Girls’ Day that we decided we just might make it a yearly event.

Upon arriving at the spa, we were led to two tubs, facing the front like a Cialis commercial. The woman filled them with the Hot Springs magic water and left us to soak. My daughter kept flicking the curtain back to tell me her tub was too cold, her water was too high, it was going to spill on the floor, this place was creepy.

Then we were led into our massage rooms. After mine was done I met a wild haired daughter in the changing room. She told me that if I intended on this being a yearly event, that I better cough up for more than this discount massage parlor or the mother/daughter thing was over. She had a roach on her table. The massage woman had bigger muscles than a weightlifter. And the woman had insisted she pull out her meticulously groomed pony tail and had rubbed massage oil into her specially shampooed and straightened hair. She would need therapy.

We hastily pulled on our clothes and bolted out of the spa. Seeing the unmistakable wild hair that resembled someone that had suffered a lightening strike, I understood that her events were somewhat founded in facts. I had to hold my sides to contain my laughter and fumbled around far too long, in her opinion, before I could grasp my keys with my oily hands and drive us out of the city at record speeds.

We stopped for a delicious lunch of which my daughter told me she had never seen anyone put butter on a biscuit, that her mashed potatoes were just far too funky to eat, and she thought the people next to us had been seen on America’s Most Wanted. We headed back home. That was after she shoved her mashed potatoes at me and confiscated my buttered biscuits.

But we had another two hours of her reclining next to me in the passenger seat with her toes spread on the windshield in front of her while 94.5 blasted through the car and she updated me on the daily events of middle school life. My face was sore from a day’s worth of laughter and my heart was full of a day’s worth of love. And I know that if it is her hand that I am holding on the day my life ends, than in a lifetime of many blessings, I will have been given one last one.