We are no longer equal

"The first time you let me go first," she said, "you won't remember how it feels." I smiled at her with a question behind my concerned eyes.

"You will worry at the time" She allowed me that one gift but firmly set her lips in a stubborn smile before continuing, "But afterwards you won't ever look back."

I wondered how we had come to this. My eleven year old daughter was telling me how I would feel about her growing up. She knew my concerns, every flaw and falter that I took when planning her future alongside her. She knew it all. I couldn't even begin to fathom how.

My mind traveled back to last weeks Autumnal sleepy mornings. One of many when she would crawl in beside me in the double bed that my husband had left a few hours earlier.  Gently she would tug my hair until I woke at which point she would say, "The angels must be slacking today Mummy."

I once questioned this childlike utterance, believing that a fairytale had prompted her airy comments. Solemnly she had corrected me, "The angels are there to make sure you wake up in the morning, in case you sleep too long and miss your life."

After that she would curl up beside me and breathe evenly as we both accepted the morning as being the start of a brand new battle. I would hear her breathe, every single time I would quieten my own silence to hear hers speaking louder, and I would hold that in my hands for the rest of the day. I kept it for the moments of quiet I needed, to get us both through.

I worried about the day when I would no longer be in her life. The day when the angels would wake her but leave me sleeping forever. Then she would surprise me by being more than capable to exist without me there. I would be redundant, consoling myself only with the fact that I had raised this incredible person. This unusual girl would one day be a grown up woman. She was an outsider by her own choice, but I found myself hoping deep inside that it won't be her choice forever.

Sometimes moments caught me when I was folding the washing, or cleaning the kitchen when I would suddenly stop and wonder what the hell I was doing with my life. How on earth had it come to this? My world was being run by a child who knew nothing... Nothing more than the evil and bad it held in its grasp. A child who when asked what animal she would come back to the world as, replied smilingly with Skunk because she didn't like crowds.

Now she took my cold hands in between her own small, warm palms and made me look at her again. Instead of letting me gather up the bits of world that we had left to shuffle them into an order that a child could understand, she was piecing them for me.

"It's my turn to be the adult." She whispered, "So let me."