eleven.

Every year on their birthdays, I write a little something for my girls. Something to mark what was happening during that time in their lives. Something to show them when they’re older so that they can know both how much they’d changed over the years, and how very much I love them. Today I pulled up what I wrote about Lucy last year, on the eve of her 10^th birthday. I read it again this morning and I got sad thinking about this last year of her life. Lucy will most likely recall her 10^th year as the year her parents began living in different houses.  This is the year that her mom started working full time for the first time in her life. This is the year of Lucy’s life when her mom listened to a lot of sad music. This is the year we all sat together as a family many times and had some of the most honest conversations we could have, all the while trying to protect Lu and her sister as much as humanly possible from hurtful truths about relationships, and about marriage, and about love.

Lucy continues to be cautious with emotional situations. She is teetering on being a teenager with every fiber of her being.  She’s listening to her own music, she’s figuring out her own style. She’s pushing boundaries as far as what she gets angry and back talk-y, and teenager-y about. And yet, there are plenty of times that she still tries to climb into my lap and snuggle with me. I will take that as long as I can, because I know it’s only a matter of time before she wants nothing to do with being that close to her mama. Lucy feels a lot of things that she doesn’t like to talk about. She’s the first to tell me all about a song she likes, or a movie that was funny, but she is the last to tell me something emotional.  She is so much like her mama in this way. One of the things we’ve started doing this year is writing notes to put in a happiness jar. We started this at the first of the year as a way to keep us thinking about the good things that were happening every day in our lives. We don’t always keep up with it, and I don’t always read what the girls write, but once, during the first week of doing this, I snuck a peek at Lucy’s note. “I got first place in Disney Infinity Race pack” (a video game they like to play with Steve). I stood in the kitchen and laughed for a long time. Sometimes I worry so much about how much I’m fucking up my girls that I miss those funny moments when they’re just normal kids who get excited about normal kid things. We’ve had a lot of those moments this year, too.

This year has been a lot of things for all of us. I hope that one day Lucy will look back and realize how much her dad and I love her and how we tried to do everything we could in this, her tenth year, to protect her heart.  In the end, there has also been a lot of laughter this year.  And, in spite of everything that seemed to fail this year, there was a lot of love: an abundance of love for Lucy Bloom.