I’m in the kitchen, getting ready to make dinner. It’s my least favorite thing. Cooking is not my passion. My teenage daughter, Gianna, is at the table, doing a school project. She’s trying to construct a roller coaster out of a matchbox car track, various pieces of cardboard, and tape. I can tell the project is not going her way by the tenseness of her shoulders and the look of exasperation that is forming on her face.

She’s a volcano on the verge of eruption.

As I begin to walk away to preheat the oven, she lets out a quiet scream of frustration and starts to cry. Angry tears are probably the worst kind of tears, because they piss you off when you were already pissed off to begin with. You’re not sad yet your eyes insist on leaking.

Out of instinct, I go to hug her. Tears equal hugs to me. Plus, mother hugs are supposed to be magical after all. As I go to wrap my arms around her neck, she pulls away. She. pulls. away. Like she was on fire and I was a heaping bucket of ice.

We were making steam and she wasn’t having it.

On the top right-hand corner of my glowing screen, it reads:

“3:06am”

WTF? That can’t be right. My phone needs to resync or something. Then I look at my laptop screen:

“3:06am”

I’m losing my mind. Why am I awake?  Why did I wake up? I had to have been up since 2:30am based on what I accomplished so far. The bars just closed and I woke up. I’m not Mark Wahlberg. I shouldn’t be out of bed at this time. Maybe I dreamed I heard my alarm and woke up not realizing it was a dream?

I recount the time I actually had time to myself during the day, away from my clingy 1-year old. Sure, my legs went numb, but those 10 minutes were glorious.

I’m sitting in the guest chair of the dimly lit optometrist room watching my oldest daughter, Gianna, prepare for her exam. Gianna, at the perfect age of 14, is sitting in the patient chair directly across from me, getting ready to cover her eyes and read the first line of bold capital letters. As I watch her there, my mind snaps back to a time when she was much younger.

In my mind, I see Gianna as she was almost 10 years ago, dressed in her signature style leggings with a short jean skirt over top, her thick blond hair framing her cheeks that still had a little bit of baby chub left in them. She wasn’t a baby anymore, but the whispers of that time were still there on her little face. She was sitting in the chair, reading that same row of black letters.

Seeing her there, my heart squeezed. Like her little hand came out from that memory and grabbed my heart like she used to hold my finger to fall asleep at night. It wasn’t just the memory of her being smaller. What tugged my heart was the specific memory of her legs.

I’m sitting in the 1960’s style cushioned seats of my high school auditorium as I watch the curtains part. I’m a freshman, attending my school’s spring musical, “Pippin.” I don’t know it yet, but the next 2 hours will end up putting me on a path that changes my life.

The beginning piano chords ring out and the audience around me fades as “Magic to Do” begins.

Front and center is a girl with dark hair, dressed in black, her face lit up by the spotlight. She looks confident, her voice is perfect, and I think she puts a spell on the entire audience. Or maybe it’s just me.

For some reason, I feel connected to this girl. I know I’ve never met or even seen her before. She goes to my school of course, but I’m a freshman and I think she must be a senior. She has that “senior look” about her. Mature, confident, with one foot in high school and one foot out the door. She’s basically everything I’m not at the moment.

No, I know I have never seen her before. Plus, it’s not like I’m a part of the musical theater crowd. Really, I’m not part of any crowd. I don’t have interests, aside from reading books. I don’t really do anything. But as this girl sings out on stage, I feel myself being compelled to “join them”, as the lyrics say in the song. To sing on stage.

To be just like her.

Is my toddler a musical prodigy or are my standards just that low? 🎶 Watching Evie sing along in the bath, I couldn’t help but wonder. Parenthood definitely has a way of making even the smallest moments feel genius… or maybe I just need more adult friends.