Baby Girl, Little Girl

This was not part of the deal.

Back when Maggie was born in April 2020, we had a magnolia tree planted in the backyard to commemorate her arrival and replace the void left by a storm-split Bradford Pear a couple of years earlier.¹

The tree is beautifully, brilliantly green year-round, but it’s right about this time that we begin to see the first blooms of the year. The giant white flowers bloom from about the beginning of May through the summer. I’ve seen the latest blooms arrive sometime around September.

This year, as the magnolia tree begins to bloom in the backyard, Susie and I have come to terms with the difficult, beautiful reality that our Magnolia has bloomed, too.

The Binder

Earlier this week, Maggie came hime from school with a three-inch binder compiled by one of her teachers full of coloring pages, pictures, and other odds-and-ends from her first full year at preschool. Perhaps the most disturbing reality hit us when we compared her picture from the first day of school to her picture on the last day of school:

We sent a baby to school and got a little girl in return. This was not part of the deal.

Our daughter was supposed to go to school to make friends. She was supposed to learn her ABCs, maybe some numbers, and how to listen to people who aren’t her parents.

She wasn’t supposed to become a little girl in the process. This was not included in our overview of the curriculum at the beginning of the year. There was no mention of this at orientation.

As we paged through the plastic-protected pages of the binder, we realized that this year was really the beginning of a new chapter in Maggie’s life. Sometime in the winter, she began to leave baby Maggie behind and become the little girl she is today. She bloomed, and she didn’t wait for the spring to bloom like her namesake. In true Maggie Martin fashion, she bloomed when she wanted.

Perhaps the most difficult realization we had as we saw the summary of Maggie’s school year was that, in some ways, Maggie isn’t ours anymore—at least, exclusively so. Of course, as we are her parents, she will always be ours. But spending ten-or-so hours away from us each week at preschool this year made her, in some sense, less than ours than she was before.

Every week she came home having learned something we did not teach her or having developed memories we did not create together. Of the 168 hours in a week, Maggie was not ours for just 10 of them.

Six percent of Maggie’s life in the last year was spent apart from us as a part of the world. It’s just the beginning, and it’s already overwhelming.

On top of all of that, she’s become a big sister and adopted her new role with great enthusiasm. She mothers her Daisy like any dutiful big sister would, and the empathetic caretaker attributes she inherited from her mother are as visible as ever.

Everything about Maggie is older now, literally and not. She gets embarrassed when she falls off her big girl bike. She can independently play and take care of herself in ways we wouldn’t have expected just eight months ago. For goodness sake, she tucks her hair behind her ear and twirls it absent-mindedly now, and my eyes well up with tears when I see her do it. It’s so dumb, but it’s true.

The Tornado

Two nights ago an EF-3 tornado was on the ground west of our house and we were in its path with about 30-minutes before it potentially arrived in the backyard. This is particularly concerning for us because we don’t have a great “safe place” in case of a dangerous tornado.²

A friend of mine who keeps track of the weather here in Nashville³ called me and said, “Get the girls, leave your house, and drive north to find shelter in a big building.” So we gathered the girls and the dog into the car, with Maggie wailing in fear, and drove to the north side of town to take shelter at a friend’s house.

Five minutes after she was losing her mind in the garage, Maggie began calmly counseling the whole car as I sped across Murfreesboro in the pouring rain with a potentially-catastrophic tornado about 30 miles over my left shoulder.⁴

“I’m really freaking out right now, and so is Rizzy. And I know we’re safe as a family. And God controls the weather”

“It’s okay, Rizzo. I know you’re freaking out, but you’re safe now.”

“God will protect us. He is in control of the weather, and he won’t let us get hurt.”

“Everything will be okay guys. It’s just a storm. Don’t worry.”

Bloomed.

I didn’t ask for a little girl this year, but I got one. And honestly, despite my fleeting feelings of indignation, I couldn’t be happier about it.

1. Bradford Pears: you either die in a storm, or you live long enough to die in a storm, but later.

2. Our house is pretty small, and every room is on an outside wall, so we’re basically stuck hanging out in the center hallway during tornado warnings. That works for a chill, spin-up tornado, but I wouldn’t want to be there for the kind that could do more than just take off part of our roof.

3. That’s putting it lightly.

4. Fortunately, the tornado-warned storm slightly weakened and continued a hard-right turn to the east and missed the house by 2.88 miles.