Down the Rabbit Hole

Bittersweet Musings from Vaccination Row

This morning I took my daughter to her four year checkup at the doctor’s office. We were waiting for the doctor while she played with some brain teaser toy. She was sitting up on the table, twisted away so her back was toward me. Her thick brown braids were running down her shoulders and her skin looked almost caramel-colored against her pink strawberry shortcake undies. She had tucked one of her legs under her and was swinging her free leg, with its bubblegum pink sock, back and forth like a pendulum as she concentrated on moving the colored wooden beads of the puzzle. I realized with some real alarm that my daughter had somehow, seemingly overnight, grown into this beautiful little girl and that all those tender earmarks of toddlerhood were completely gone. She had sailed gracefully through those milestones and I thought, not for the first time, how does it go so quickly? Then all at once the doctor knocks and the sound sends her barreling back into my lap. She looks up at me with wide eyes that are a shade of green that falls somewhere between jade and aquamarine. She leans into me as the doctor starts his exam, watches me as I answer the questions about her development. She complies with his requests, though silently and with as little eye contact as she can manage. Later when the nurse gives her the vaccinations, she goes rigid in my arms and sobs into my shirt, a heartbreaking sound that even turns the stoic nurse teary-eyed and apologetic. Then it’s over. I get her dressed and she is picking out her stickers and chatting all the way to the parking lot, holding my hand and politely reminding me that I promised we would stop for munchkins before school. Another annual exam over, another year gone, memorialized in the updated vaccination records and percentile scaling.

One of my friends from college is expecting now with her first child, another has a little girl who just passed the five month mark…new parents just embarking on this journey. Soon they will realize how much slower life seemed to move before they begin to measure it by the rate that their children grown and mature before their eyes. Time moved at such a different pace for me before my daughter and now it races forward. This motherhood thing, it’s really something. It’s amazing and challenging. It’s wondrous and joyful and frightening all at the same time. It humbles me, completes me and defines me in all new ways. Mostly though, it makes me conscious of the way time passes, of how fleeting some moments are and of how truly precious each and every day is.