And, to think, I often wondered where she got that angsty gene from

Antonia, my oldest, was a born nervous wreck. If I didn’t know better, I’d have said that she’d been sharing womb space with Marilyn Manson for nine months. Traumatized is the only word I can use to describe her chubby, little facial expressions and her glass-shattering vocal pitch for the first year of her life. I do realize that newborns are supposed to cry. Some even have a condition commonly referred to as colic. But this was… different. Antonia seemed genetically-inclined to be disturbed by things like sunlight, water, nutrition, voices that didn’t belong to her mother, shiny things, furry things, socks, music, kisses, touching in general, and the concept of SLEEP, for crying out loud… I say this because she cried out loud. For YEARS UPON YEARS, she cried out loud. When she was two months old, I decided to quit my job because I was afraid that day care people would surely throw her out with the dirty diapers just from sheer delirium. I thought, ONLY the person who gave birth to this thing can dig their claws into the cliff of sanity and keep from descending into prison. Alls I can say is THANK GOD I had that innate love thing going on. Otherwise, who knows.

But, unbelievably, doctor after doctor checked her out and told me how TOTALLY healthy she was. HOW, I wondered. She barely eats because she’s too busy crying. She sleeps in ten-minute increments, but only if I lay her on my chest and sleep in an upright position in front of a TV with the volume COMPLETELY turned down and the dryer humming ever-so-softly in the background. She bites her nails and pulls out her hair, and something tells me that if I offered her a cigarette, she’d actually BREATHE a little easier. She HATES life!

Friends and relatives tried to comfort me by saying things like, just wait till she’s walking, you’ll long for the days when you couldn’t PRY her off your leg with a good set of lineman’s pliers. Just wait till she gets some teeth and can eat candy… it’s the ultimate bargaining tool to get a kid to shut up. None of those things turned out to be the Godsend that everyone guaranteed they’d be. Once she started walking she just grabbed my hand and took me with her as she screamed about the birds chirping or cold floors beneath her feet or people making eye contact. She had no interest in candy for the first five years of her life, either. It was like she KNEW there were ulterior motives involved in its flagrant distribution. Reading Dooce’s account of potty-training hell brought back HORRIBLE memories of just how hard Antonia’s early years were. If I’d had the brilliant ability to think coherent thoughts under extreme duress like Ms. Dooce does, I could have written that post seven years ago… without the hate mail-mention from someone named Catherine, of course… I feel the need to say that was a DIFFERENT Catherine.

Anyway, something DID finally make things all better for Antonia. Having another child. Can you believe I actually HAD another child after this experience? On purpose even! And I haven’t even made mention to the four days of labor and sadistic OB that didn’t “believe” in cutting Antonia out of my exhausted body. Still, I had Jonah. And HE was my Godsend. He distracted his older sister by slobbering all over her pretty-girl shoes, and eating off of her plate, and grabbing fistfuls of her hair and taking them with him to another room. She loved him dearly for it. As did I. But the honeymoon didn’t last very long. We had to move to another town. She had to go to Kindergarten. She was forced to endure her parent’s separation and eventual divorce. Trauma upon trauma. There were times when I thought, “This parenting thing… it’s so NOT my bag.” DIFFICULT isn’t an apt-enough word to describe what parenting was for me. And yet, how could I complain? Like the doctors all said, she was HEALTHY. She was so many things that other children weren’t…. Walking. Talking. Feeling pain. Breathing without assistance. I felt like a wimp. How could I not cope with her tears and screams and ability to make me feel two inches high when, time after time, I’d ruin her life? What was wrong with me? I never did figure it out. She’s nine-and-a-half years old now. And, somehow, we’ve muddled through without killing one another. Sometimes I still feel like I'm clinging onto that cliff of sanity; even if it's by the tips of my highly-fragile fingernails. Meanwhile, Toni has become much calmer over the years. One might even say serene.

And yet this parenting gig... it continues to knock me to my knees. Antonia wants an email account and her own blog now. I know lots of good parents out there have allowed their nine-year-olds the privilege of stretching their wings a little. And their worlds haven’t fallen apart for having done so. And I also know that there ARE options like parent-controlled email accounts and blogs. But I’m still not completely sure that she’s ready for THAT much independence. What would I have published on my blog had I been allowed such an opportunity at the age of nine? I realize that I’m someone who torched her high school diaries after college because she finally saw that excessive amounts of melodrama could corrode a person’s eyeballs. But, still, I wonder if I would have gossiped about that girl Debbie who had a head lice problem? Would I have confessed about my crush on Joshua Feaselman? Would I have talked about how afraid I was of Mr. Westbrook's teeth? And my grandma’s closet? Would I have had the wherewithal to not give out my address and phone number and favorite place to ride my bike on weekends? I don’t know, but it makes me kind of glad that I didn’t have that option.

My daughter, on the other hand, is growing up to be a bright, discerning, thoughtful human being. But she’s still NINE. And, okay, yeah, maybe I’m missing that clingy baby of mine who didn’t know how to interact with the outside world for the first five years of her life. But it’s not just water and sunlight anymore. Scarier things exist. Chain letters, pornographic spam, forty-year-old men googling phrases like “I heart my Tamagotchi!” There’s only so much I can do to protect my grown baby now that she doesn’t demand that I hold her hand 23 hours of the day. And that kills me sometimes.... SO MUCH MORE than the glass-shattering cries ever did.