Gracyn, photo by her mother

How did it get so late so soon? It’s night before it’s afternoon. December is here before it’s June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?    Dr. Seuss            

In a couple weeks, my granddaughter, Gracyn, will officially become a teenager. As only Dr. Seuss can so perfectly put it: the time has flewn–and, I suppose it goes without saying, much too soon.

It’s been years since I spent hours on my knees as we played with her Dora the Explorer doll house or imagined lavish mermaid tales as she took “recreational” baths. And though my knees are older and I don’t get up as quickly or gracefully, I’d gladly spend the hours on my knees again just to relive some of the most intimate moments we’ve shared over the years. I’d haul out all the slime-making ingredients and equipment, decorate my home with lovingly crafted homemade holiday decorations, plan special “welcome home”parties for Aunt Megan, buy live Easter bunnies (which reproduced, literally, like rabbits) and assume care of them, and carefully buckle April (a life-sized baby doll that people often mistook for a real baby) into my car for town trips. I’d do it all again, for I know that it’s gotten late too soon.

I’d go back to the antique store where she’d hidden the Cabbage Patch doll she desperately wanted so well that it took me 20 minutes of serious looking before I spied a corner of its ruffled dress peeking out from behind a row of assorted toys. She’d talked about it for days, the days leading up to her brother’s birth. She should have it, I thought, as I recalled–decades earlier–queuing in a Target parking lot before dawn with other faithful (crazy?) mothers who’d waited for hours to get one of the Cabbage Patch dolls from the new shipment rumored to arrive. The 20 minutes spent strolling around the antique store in air-conditioned comfort was nothing when I remembered my frozen feet and layers of clothing. Yes, she should have a baby to care for as her mother would soon bring home a new baby brother to care for, I reasoned. And so, each day we visited the hospital, her own baby lovingly diapered and dressed for the day, her four-year-old hand in mine as we navigated the elevator to the maternity floor.

I’d go back to the crowded school gymnasium where she stood with her third-grade classmates during an event in which they’d dressed up as famous figures and had prepared to tell visitors all about them. Nervously, she stood there in blonde ringlets, patent leather Mary Jane shoes, and a blue baby doll dress. “I’m Shirley Temple, Grandma,” she proudly announced and then rattled off the biographical facts she’d memorized. She was spectacular, if I do say so. Yet I struggled to stay in the moment, for I could feel how time pressed in and on, how the days of ringlets and Mary Janes would pass all too soon.

I’d go back to the many, many times when she wore her heart gloriously, painfully on her sleeve. Before the impending teenage years of cool indifference, there have been years of tearful goodbyes when she’d already begun to grieve the temporary loss of family and friends. There have been years when she lived vicariously through movie characters whose suffering she felt deeply. I worried (and continue to worry) about protecting her heart from all those people and things that would trample it. Because I would keep this heart just as it is, keep time and the world at bay.

In her novel, Vanishing Acts, Jodi Picoult writes:

Whether it is conscious or not, you eventually make the decision to divide your life in half—before and after—with loss being that tight bubble in the middle. You can move around in spite of it; you can laugh and smile and carry on with your life, but all it takes is one slow range of motion, a doubling over to be fully aware of the empty space at your center.

For most parents and grandparents, there is a certain before and after as their children and grandchildren pass from childhood to adolescence, from adolescence to adulthood, from adulthood to old age. And as Picoult writes, we often experience loss as a tight bubble in the middle. Even when we know that such passage is inevitable and, in the long run, good, we may still have moments when we double over at the full awareness of this loss. The day that we donated the Dora doll house to Goodwill was one of those days. I bagged up all the plastic figures, the house and furniture and drove it 10 miles to the donation site. For years, it had occupied the shelf in our dining-room-turned-toy-room. For years, we’d added to our doll family as we found new figures we just had to have. For years, we’d created a family history for these figures, one rich with births and marriages, vacations and holidays. For years, the plastic horse-drawn carriage had made trips around the room, and the family van (with the horn that really honked and the missing door) had been packed with the chosen few. These were the before years, and at times, remembering them can be like a gut punch.

I have no doubts that there will be glorious after years during which, God willing, I’ll witness Gracyn’s passage into adulthood–and perhaps into motherhood. And as I watch this transformation, I’m sure that I’ll once again think: How did it get so late so soon?