Naomi

Naomi got her ears pierced yesterday. She had had them pierced in August as a birthday present, and that time was marked by the kind of drama only Naomi can muster. We were all on our way to a party—about 10 of us—and we stopped quickly at the mall because she couldn’t be happy for another second without her ears pierced (and I had promised). She was on again off again up and down on the tall chair. NoIdon’twanttodoit. Yesyesyes I do want to do it. No. Yes. For 45 minutes. Finally, the woman at the free-piercing place got impatient and just pierced one ear just as Naomi was getting down, having decided again that she wouldn’t get them pierced at all. Naomi looked at her with shock and rage. “OUCH. THAT HURT!” she roared just as another woman came up on the other side and pierced the other ear. Righteous indignation—and pain and rage and fear—poured from Naomi and she screamed and screamed. I had to remove her from the store as we wandered from place to place, trying to find something that would distract her. Then, eight weeks later, she decided to try sleeping for a single night without her earrings in, and in the morning, the holes had healed through. I felt sick with misery about it, remembered the horror of getting them, and the weeks of cleaning and turning and worrying about how they’d heal. And now, just at the time when she could take out her earrings and put in other ones, just as people were giving her earrings for presents, the holes were gone gone gone.

So the deal has been that she just needs to say the word, and she can get them pierced again. And last week, she said the word. We walked through the Porirua mall to find a place, and no one would do it last Sunday, so, tearfully, Naomi decided that we’d do it this week on a Saturday, and that her friend J would come along and get her ears pierced too. So it was, on Saturday morning, I found myself with two nervous girls sitting in the Chemist shop (that’s where you get your ears pierced in NZ) and feeling my own heart racing to keep speed with the girls.

Naomi is older now, and she was with a friend, and so there was no scene. The gentle NZ young women who did the piercing didn’t have to trick or cajole. They just counted to three as Naomi’s eyes welled up with tears and she trembled in my arms. And then “ouch ouch ouch that hurt” from Naomi and then it was over. New earrings sparkle in ears, she looks 3 years older than she looked before, and I feel the heaviness and lightness of her growing.

Naomi has outgrown all of her winter clothes. We’ve unpacked them all from the container; she has scattered them all over the room and then gathered them all up, tried them all on, and made piles of the ones that don’t fit. Which is most of them. She’s grown almost an inch in the 3 months we’ve been here, more than two inches since June when we last marked her height on the stick we use (because we’ve never been anywhere long enough to use a doorframe. We had to buy her all new clothes last weekend, and we had to find just the right things for her willowy lovely body. Her friends are starting to wear bras. On hot days she really needs deodorant. She seems to be growing up.

I look at her, this child who was my tiny baby not so long ago, and I marvel at the changes in her. We walk on the beach most nights (alas, not now that daylight savings has come to our autumn), and we hold hands and talk together—about horses, about the universe, about why some people hurt other people. I find her genuinely interesting—not in the oh-my-child-is-interesting-because-she-is-my-child way, but in the way I find friends interesting. She is smart and curious and funny and wonderful. Then she baits her brother and kicks him and then falls down, screaming, a pre-emptive crying strike designed to out-cry him. Sometimes it must work, but I’ve been catching her at it much more often.

Naomi was a sunshiny, defiant little child. She threw tantrums, teased other children, was often in the timeout chair in the office when I picked her up from preschool. Now she is an ebullient, lovely thing, laughing with her friends in her tree house, dancing along the beach, talking about what she should name the horse she hopes she’ll eventually have. She is responsible, brushes her hair until it shines, takes (mostly) good care of her things. She is (mostly) honest. She has become the slightly priggish elder sister who speaks in superior voices about how she’s NEVER been in trouble at this school, whereas Aidan is not quite a stranger to trouble. She has somehow forgotten those long hours in the timeout chair at a school on the other side of the world.

As I am going through all these changes inside me, wondering who I am and why I was born and what I’m meant to do with my time on this planet, Naomi is doing the same in her own way. She’s beginning to get crushes on boys (although never admitting that, even to me) and making sense of complex emotions which sometimes overtake her—jealousy, anger, hurt. She walks barefoot around the village and talks about how tough her feet are getting.

Along with those toughening feet, she has a tougher spirit—she can face bigger adversity with equanimity. And her defiance has mellowed to something that is closer to determination and spunk (when she was on the ground screaming as a 3-year-old, I prayed that determination and spunk were just around the corner). Twice she’s gone to the park alone; twice she and Aidan have walked to school alone as I waited by the door nervously. Both times, it seems to have been the doing of it that matters, because once she has accomplished this feat twice, she is no longer interested. It is not her interest to get away from me right now—as it will be in the future—right now it is just her hope to be able to exercise her independence.

And so she does cartwheels in Memorial Hall, rides her bike barefoot around the lawn, cuddles up with me and says, “So what shall we converse about now?” She lives in the moment and lives for the future, constantly asking her friends where they’ll go to high school or university. Each night in bed we turn out the lights and cuddle in the darkness of her room, and I ask her about 5 things she’s grateful about, and every night, that cuddling time makes it to the top 5. When I’m feeling busy and like bedtime is taking forever, and she tells me that one of the very best parts of her day is there in the dark, the two of us cuddled in her bed, I think forward to a day when she won’t want me there at all. And I live in the moment too.

Those moments as she was getting her ears pierced were much like life—endless and instant. I looked up into her terrified, strong face and loved her as hard as I possibly could. Tried to send my love to her, not to protect her from the pain which was coming, but to join my love with her pain in some way. When I told her that, cuddled last night, she told me that she had felt all my love coming towards her and that’s why it had been easier this time. The five things for which she was grateful last night: getting her ears pierced, having a whole piece of naan to herself at lunch, watching a movie with Aidan and Rob as Michael and I went out on a date, going for a long walk on the beach, and cuddling with me. I look at her, look at her list, think of my life, and I can hardly contain my gratitude.

(Pictures today: Naomi and me at the zoo just after we moved to DC in 2002. Everything else is from yesterday.)