Turning pages

I woke an unsteady mother.  I poured too much cream into my cup, my lips forming a thin line, about to break.  If risk is the price of admission to parenthood, devastation is the worst souvenir.

She made me a mother.  Nothing made me happier than that.
I loved her like there was no tomorrow.  And then one day there wasn't.
Nothing makes me sadder than that.
 
There are moments when it feels like my spirit was severed from my body with hers.  My daughter is gone.  And so with her, her mother.   Not me, entirely, but the part of me that was her mom.  That part of me left the room with her last year.

And so I awoke thinking of that part, the mother who went missing.  I gulped caffeine and put on my game face, coffee sliding like a coin into a slot, attitude slower to cooperate.  I may not have been a great mother this morning, but I made up for it this afternoon.  I did press problems illustrated with iPhones and donuts, and raced dollar store matchbox cars under wooden block bridges.  I made dinner as requested and doled out brownies before clean plates.  I read bedtime books like words were our second dessert.  I stroked foreheads and scratched backs and turned pages about trucks while I tried to still the longing for Madeline and Eloise and Pippi with the same bright red hair.

I know this collection of words cannot transform into visions of Celia.  Still I write, partly out of compulsive habit and partly out of cautious hope.  I trust she cannot be forgotten, but I'm still trying to figure out how to bring her forward through time with me.