Natalie has started doing this thing, Molly told me yesterday. She’ll be playing along, happy like she always is, and then she’ll reach up to Molly – or crawl up on her - and just want to be held. She’ll put her arms around Molly’s neck and be perfectly happy there, tagging along with whatever Molly’s doing. Which would be fine, but sometimes Molly has to do something that requires putting her down, and then Nattie cries and cries and cries.

Enjoy it, I told her. When she’s 14, you’ll be willing to trade your left arm to hold her close again and she won’t have anything to do with you … until she turns, say, 33.

We both laughed, remembering. The moment reminded me of something Elizabeth Berg wrote, which I’ve adapted to fit my own circumstances:

“Life can be so slippery. A twelve-year-old girl looking into the mirror to assess whether the mole near her nose might be considered Marilyn-esque reaches out toward herself and that reflection turns into that of a woman on her wedding day, straightening the neckline of her sister’s graduation dress. That bride blinks and reopens her eyes to see a frazzled young mother trying to get the burp stain off her blazer before heads across the field to the school where she must teach in eighteen minutes. That young woman bends down to retrieve ‘Corduroy,’ the stuffed animal her daughter has left on the bathroom floor, and rises up to see her mother in the mirror, wondering when that age spot got there.” cheap sexy wedding dresses