Firsts
and Lasts
by Molly Williams
This is the season of firsts and lasts. Big, ceremonial
beginnings and endings. Weddings and graduations,
babies and baptisms and showers and May Crownings; I am awash in them. Wonderful things
that we celebrate outdoors in lovely dresses with flowers and gifts and lots of
Facebook postings.
But our lives are filled with hundreds of smaller
beginnings and endings. I have a theory that we almost always remember the
first time that we do something, but that when the last time that we do that
thing rolls around, we hardly ever know when it is. If we knew it was the last,
would we be able to do it? Or would we hesitate, paralyzed by the idea of never
having this moment back, or that this day or this friend or this song might
come to its end?
We remember and record our child’s first steps, their
first words, their first birthday, but what about the thousands of little daily
things that happen, each of which may be the last, but we allow to pass
unnoticed, because to catch them all would be impossible. How often does a memory of a friend pop into
mind, and I think about how long I had not thought of her; then I wonder about
all the ones I have not thought of at all, and I am saddened by a loss I can’t
even identify. To live with that loss
burbling beneath the surface would be unbearable; yet to let it go seems
criminally cold.
A few years ago a famous local restaurant forced by
development from its longtime location held a “last-night” party for over a
month. It was packed more than ever each night, as everyone wanted to be part
of its history, even though we all knew it was reopening just a few miles away
a few months later. But the ending was the lure – the exclamation point on an
experience makes us part of it.
With our growing children it is doubly hard, because we
are both a part of it and wanting to record it; we are exhausted from and
exhilarated by the constancy of forward movement, and need to accelerate and
stop it at the same time.
I wish I knew when was the last time my daughter reached
up to be held, when I swept her up in my arms to my hip as I had done countless
times before. I would have buried my head in the vanishing baby scent of her,
and held her so close her heart once again beat in rhythm with mine, so she
would always somehow remember what we used to sound like together. But I didn’t
know, so she squirmed and seemed heavy, and I put her down and she ran away,
and that was the last time.
They say time marches on, but that is too loud and joyous
a word for what it does. Time is a sneaky silent thief who steals moments away
when you should have been paying attention but you’re not, and suddenly all the
firsts have become lasts, and you wonder when that happened. The first bright
pink backpack has become the ripped up last tattered pile of notebooks she’s
really ready to throw away, and the first photo and kiss at the school house
door is now the rush out to a last final exam with sometimes a hurried bye at
her car as she pulls on the uniform skirt for the last time ever.
In a few weeks my daughter will don the pearls my mother
gave me and I will give her. She will walk down the stage in a lovely white
dress and let me put a laurel wreath on her shining head, taking her last bow
on the stage of her childhood. With her classmates she will sing her school
song in French as her great-grandmother, grandmother, mother and cousin did
before her. She will carry out these traditions beautifully, although she has
already told me she may not stay in our hometown, and she may not send her
daughter to the same school. She may be the last of our family there, and that
is ok.
A few weeks after that she will take a last look around
her childhood bedroom and not make her bed for the last time. She will over pack up and head out our door,
leaving something important behind like always. We will drive her seven hours
away, where she will take her first steps into her new room with a first ever
roommate, and we will both cry, because this is one last we saw coming from a
million miles away, but it still really really hurts. I won’t know any better
how to store this in my heart than the stealthy ones that crept up on me, it’s
just that this will have a huge neon flashing ouch dinging me for a long while
to come.
One day next winter I will realize that I didn’t wake up
missing her, and that our house no longer echoes her giggly stomping feet, and
we actually found fun things to do. That will be my first, a new first, a
starting over first; not fresh anymore, but certainly wise and weathered and
calm, and ready for whatever.
She deserves her firsts too; her first brave steps into her life all her
own, not repeating my eternal 80’s angsty crises. She is a cautious warrior, a
listener before a doer, a respecter of tradition and then a breaker of
barriers. She will be fearless, once she believes from me there is nothing to
fear. First, she will dip a toe, then dive, into the deep end of her bottomless
pool, if I clap my hands and urge her to Jump, Baby, Jump! Last, she looks back deeply, truly and
sometimes longingly, but has never doubted her heading. Her thousand little firsts are yet to come,
her regrets not having greeted the dawning rays of the morning star.
Tomorrow beckons, mommy waves goodbye. I guess I’m good with that.
