My girl Gracie

My girl Gracie. I talked to Melissa today at length, about labor and all those details – she is due in two days and naturally full of questions, curiosity, anxiety. Describing every detail of Grace’s painful, 36-hour labor really brought me back to those days, almost 5 years ago. I remembered the shakes, the screaming, and described myself in the late stages of natural labor as a “wild animal,” a description with which Matt concurred. A detail I shared with Melissa that many don’t know is that as Grace crowned, I reached down, put my hands under her armpits, and pulled her squalling infant body onto my chest by myself. In some sense, I delivered her (which is not to reduce the enormous contribution of my incredible midwife and doula). I brought Grace – grace? (sorry, can’t help it) – onto myself, into my life, actively and with intention.
I have thought before that that hurricane of an arrival was not uncorrelated with how Grace has swept through my life, through my very sense of myself. Her birth was just the first way in which she has forced me to reevaluate everything I thought I knew, just the first step in a wholesale tear-down of all of those assumptions I had built into solid foundations. Her 7 pound, 12 ounce self was enough to rip me to shreds, physically, emotionally, psychologically. I’d never do it another way, but she wasn’t an “easy” introduction to motherhood.
And perhaps that is what I deserve. When I look at the picture above, we look SO much alike. And the ways in which she is difficult now are all easily traceable to ways in which I am also difficult. She is my doppelganger, the person I hold dearest, the most honest mirror in which I am forced to see myself. Small things decimate her, the littlest loss of control reduces her to tears, and nothing shakes her more than feeling that someone is angry at her. All of these are traits drawn straight from my playbook. Staring me down, she is defiant, stubborn, and bold, but as soon as I raise my voice and imply by my tone alone that she has done something wrong she dissolves into tears and a vicious spiral of tantrummy weeping. She is quixotic, in love with life, replete with questions and overflowing with energy. She plays hard, runs fast, and then falls into sound sleep for twelve hours. In almost every way she is so purely my child; I suppose it is no wonder that she is also the person who can push my buttons faster and more acutely than anyone on this earth.
Someone wise once told me that it’s precisely the qualities that we aspire to in a grown daughter that drive us the most insane in a toddler. That is surely true with the intelligent, fiercely independent Grace Eldredge Russell. She may cause me to turn prematurely gray, but I’m also quite certain that she’ll be the person I’m proudest to know when my days come to an end. I am blessed with, humbled by, and grateful for the task of raising her, and it is clear to me that the dramatic, painful, and empowering way she entered the world was just an introduction to the way she will continue to rattle, impact, and improve me all the way to my core.