Hold My Hand

My 8-year-old started a Saturday acting camp a few weeks ago and on the first day, she was understandably feeling a little anxious about the prospect of meeting new people. As we sat together in the theater lobby waiting for class to begin, I glanced at her and my heart turned over  at the sight of her wrinkled brow and lips pressed together with worry. Reflexively, I reached for her hand. She shook it off.

I felt like I had been slapped in the face.

Punky has been my shadow now, my mini-me, for nearly a decade. I never had to worry about her wandering off when she was very small. She stayed right by my side, so close sometimes that I would call out for her, not realizing that she was quietly standing right beneath me, her body a hair’s breadth away from my own.

As she’s grown, she’s become more independent, but she still doesn’t like to be away from me for very long. She still says she’s not sure whether she’s ready to sleep over at a friend’s house, because she doesn’t know if she can bear to be away from us for a whole night. She rhapsodizes still about the days when I home preschooled her and routinely asks if she can be home schooled again so that she won’t have to be away from me for so many hours each day. She still sits in my lap quite often, still does “the kissing hand” with me each day before school, still wants to spend every moment with me that she can.

And of course, she still always wants to holds my hand.

Or at least, she did.

I didn’t outwardly react that day when she shook my hand off of her own, but I haven’t been able to forget it. It was just one of what will soon be many small signs that my daughter is growing up and becoming more independent. I want her to be able to rely on her own reserves of strength when she has to, because my hand won’t always be there for her to hold. What she did was absolutely normal and understandable.

I just wasn’t prepared for it to hurt so much.

Image via woolennium/Flickr