They grow up so fast.

Here's Penny and I when she was a few years lighter and I a few pounds heavier. I remember this day like it was yesterday. I was painting her fingernails.

Today we went for a pedicure, and had someone else paint our toenails. She fell asleep during the treatment, so I laid there looking at her from time to time, totally amazed at the fact that she is growing up.

Facing her first heartbreak (of the romantic sort, for her young life was a series of it's own kind of heartbreak) tonight, she asked to be alone in Nicole's room since she's away for the weekend. She laid in the dark, ate lots of chocolate, and is now singing songs about boys that lie and girls who want to escape that pain.

Everything in me wants to fix her life for her, somehow transplant my years into her youth and help her along this high and lonely road she is walking. Each day is like a war for teenagers, and Im so afraid she will give up the fight, forget that she is strong, or decide the enemy's camp is easier. I'm praying tonight.

Penny and I had such a nice day together, laughing at my foibles cause i'm always falling or spilling something or sticking my foot in my mouth. She finds it very entertaining, but she also loves me for it. She and I drove around in a rented 1976 VW Classic Beetle, light blue like her shirt in this photograph, singing Switchfoot (She likes Switchfoot!), walking around barefoot (she likes to be barefoot!), hair pulled back and a song in our hearts. At one point, I looked over and felt like I was with a small version of me...16 and 11/12th's years old, scared as hell, hanging on day by day for some sign of relief. Thankfully Penny is not nearly as tormented by inner demons as I was, but I partly feel it's because, as she said today "Im not in denial, I just dont want to talk about it". Oh Lord, deliver this child from it all.

Im glad that the Lord has preserved her and I's relationship. Not all her relationships have survived her tumultuous little life, but ours has made it one more day. In two weeks, she turns 17. Really? Seventeen, that can't be right?! Just yesterday I was painting her nails and pulling lice out of her poor hair, and now she's going to movies with friends, ordering Penny-tailored meals at restaurants, making me laugh and making me cry and making me want to pull my hair out.

I guess that short moment today at the movies,while waiting for her friend to arrive, when she sat in my lap and played mindlessly with my hair, is a sign that a child still resides in that young woman's body. A reminder that she's not all Rehana music and trendy clothes...she's also a little girl.

Therefore, if anyone messes with her, I will have to hurt them :)

Comments

  1. StacieMarch 20, 2013 at 2:37 AM

    What a sweet picture. It doesn't seem right that she should be so grown up! Or that we should either, really. It doesn't seem all that long ago that we drove around, sporting flip flops, and singing our hearts out with our friend Patty... And look where we are now!

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