together

“Eeeeeek!!!  We are two girls who hate snakes!”  She shrieks in a falsetto “this must be what girls sound like when they’re scared” kind of way.  She’s huddled against my arm, quaking with pretend tremors at the grow-300%-in-two-days-rubber-snake that’s bobbing innocently enough in a measuring glass of water across the table from us.  She’s decked from head-to-toe in a purple nightgown that she put on, backward, by herself during quiet time.

We are two girls.

She’s categorizing us like this a lot these days.  Mama and Little Friend against the world.  Mama and Little Friend united by ponytails, the color pink, baby-bearers, bread-bakers,  high-jumpers, snake-haters.  Whatever it is we’re doing, we’re doing it together.  Me and a backward-nightgown-clad wisp of a big-girl growing up attached to my arm.  We are two girls.

I’d be happy to get a tattoo together.  Something that etches this portrait of closeness on the very muscle fibers and flapping valves of our hearts.  Some tattoo that reminds each of us permanently with each flex and gush of blood flow that we are together.  Always.  We are two girls.

Because what I’m thinking is this: I’d like her to remember this togetherness ten years down the road when, for a period in her life, I will become that person she needs to define herself against, not with.  In those moments when we are separate, when she’s making solo choices in good or bad directions, sometimes directions that veer far off of a path I’d choose for myself, I want some strong scar-tissued message to beat unseen in her chest: We are two girls.  As simple as that.  We are two girls who don’t like snakes.

With someone like that by your side, you can face every “eeeeeek!” that life throws at you.

Gratefully inspired by and shared with the readers of The Gypsy Mama’s Five Minute Fridays.