Hands

It was a later than usual bedtime, as anxieties about the new school year were hovering all around all of us. Elsie, at eight years old, sweetly asked if I would sit and snuggle with her as she drifted to sleep this one night. Of course, knowing snuggles are seeming to become fewer and farther between, I slinked my legs under her fluffy white comforter and found my formerly regular spot by her side. I could feel her breathing relax, time slowed down, and she reached for my hand and draped it across her body to hold as she drifted off to dreamland.

I’ve held her hand a lot, easily a million times, and in this moment, something felt different. As a new parent, you know your baby will grow. You expect the chubby baby cheeks to morph into an older more kidlike face. You know inches will add to inches in height and there are so many more milestones you look forward to.

But the hands. I wasn’t planning to notice the hands.

Stronger grip, longer fingers, painted nails. Instead of her baby grip wrapping around my pointer finger, we laid fully hand-in-hand and the change, the difference struck me. It sank me, actually. Those tiny baby hands that I remember digging into their first avocado or splashing around their first bubble bath or reaching for me in the wee hours of the night - those tiny baby hands were gone. Changed, forever they were.

Even Leo, who is three, has grown out of those baby hands. His still enveloped in that toddler body but now he wears dirt under his fingernails like a badge of honor. He reaches for popsicles and opens granola bars and those hands, they’ve changed.

But then again, so have mine.

Aged, lived-in, and worked. My hands aren’t of the 30 year old new mother who so carefully lifts her baby out of bed or who worriedly cuts up cantaloupe or who frantically dials the pediatrician for the minorest of things. I’ve changed too.

We’ve grown together, me and them. My hand in their hands, we have been on the best journey that there ever was, and I guess the lesson in all of this is that growth and change are inevitable for all of us, but nobody is growing or changing alone. Our journey is with each other.

We all have each other, hand in hand.