Bandaids

These past six years have been a slow, painful peel of two things once joined.

My daughter’s Bandaid is chafing her skin and pulling at its tiny hairs, but she can’t decide whether to pull it off or leave it on. She’s crying in the bathroom, paralyzed by indecision. Our bedtime routine has ground to a halt. My initial attempts to soothe her have failed and we’re hurtling inexorably to the point where I will either yell at her or rip the Bandaid off myself in order to end this torture. 

Do other moms have more patience? Would another mom join her daughter on the bathroom floor? Would she repeat this cycle many times a day? I always wonder this as I hover above us in these moments, trying my best to play the part of the tender mother. 

Tonight, at least, I successfully fight my instinct to rip off the Bandaid. I hug my daughter until she decides to go to bed with it still intact. I walk into her room the next morning and find her slowly, painstakingly peeling it off. She grins proudly as she holds it up like the decapitated head of a monster. “Everything feels easier in the morning, huh?” I say. She nods and hugs me. She had known best.

“I had to physically peel her off me and run out the door,” I text my husband after dropping my daughter off at her first day of dance camp. I’m in my car, embarrassed at the tears I’m fighting and thinking about the other moms who swooped in to help. Those moms had crouched down and talked to my daughter about feelings and starting slow and checking back in. I had simply said, “I love you so much, but I need to leave now,” as she sobbed and begged me to stay. I separated her clinging limbs from my body one by one and speed-walked away. My instinct is always to rip off the Bandaid. Sniffling in the car, I peek through the window and see my daughter sitting alone at the edge of the studio, also sniffling. Starting slow. She’s smiling when I pick her up that afternoon.

I grit my teeth through moments like this and recall how close we were at the beginning of our bond—same body, same blood, same food, same sounds; a Russian Doll of two. These past six years have been a slow, painful peel of two things once joined. I’ve read that babies don’t learn they’re separate from their mothers until they’re six months old. And when do the mothers learn? I’m still finding out. 

I sometimes tiptoe into my daughter’s bedroom multiple times a night to make sure she is still breathing. She tiptoes into my bedroom, too. She wraps herself around me at playdates. She grins (or sobs) and bears the ripping-off feeling as she watches my car back out of the garage. I grin (or sob) and bear the same feeling as she grows into a kid who will—someday soon—be too big for me to carry.

The experience of peeling her off me at camp, though just a season ago, already feels far away. The seasons pass so quickly. Tonight, she sprinted excitedly into her dance studio before I could catch her for a hug. And then there are the quick goodbyes at school dropoff. There are afternoons when she closes her bedroom door and writes in diaries I can’t read. There are moments when I hear her whispering with her friends about first-grade crushes on boys I’ve never met. 

I am trying to weave the threads of these experiences into a cohesive cloth, perhaps one that is sticky on one side and can staunch the punishing flow of love from the wound where my daughters and I were once attached. This reality—that they will grow and change and eventually leave to live their lives separate from mine—is so obviously the goal of all this, and yet so shocking. If I think about it for too long, I start to feel the urge to disassociate, to mentally rip away from them now to save myself the pain later. 

But I’m trying my best to be tender, and part of being tender is allowing yourself to be tenderized. The only way forward is the slow, painful peel. The skin beneath is raw and soft and vulnerable. There’s not a Bandaid big enough to cover it. But who needs Bandaids when my daughter falls asleep as she did tonight, running her hand up and down my arm the way she learned from me, soothing my tender skin.