Paint

    I watch her little puffs of breath fill the museum glass, make it dirty. Someone else will clean it up.

    She reads the tiny print of the description. She’s been fascinated by robotics ever since I gave her a Scientific American article on bionic limbs.

    “Mommy?” She still calls me Mommy, even though she’s eight. My sister’s kids call her Mom, and they’re even younger.

    “Yes?”

    “What if I got bionic parts for every part of the body and put them all together?”

    “It would be an android, I guess.” You’d need an artificial brain. It couldn’t function otherwise.

    “I could do that someday.”

    “You could.” She’s going into third grade. In two days. Only two days.

    She worries me, every new school year. She hasn’t got any friends, as far as I can tell. Or any problems with the other kids, either, which is at least an improvement from my childhood. She doesn’t seem to bother with the other kids much.

    “I hope my teacher’s good this time.” I can’t help but feel proud that my daughter is the kind of kid who isn’t afraid to call her teacher a manipulative liar and demand better subject matter. I still hope she gets along with this one, though.

    “I hope so, too,” I say, sighing. My own breath fogs the glass, a couple feet above my daughter’s.

    “You don’t think my teacher will be good.”

    “Okay.”

    “You don’t. You’re trying to trick me, but it isn’t working. You’re worried.”

    “Okay.”

    “You’re trying to stay indecisive. Just stop it!”

    “Darling, ‘okay’ is affirmative. It means ‘yes.’”

    “Not the way you’re using it.” It’s so hard to have a conversation with her. She’s so . . . wary. Truthfully, I wouldn’t want to be her teacher.

    I think of my year in the third grade. Awful. Just the worst year of my life, and I was the quiet girl with a few quiet friends who sat in the middle row and paid attention.

    My daughter is more . . . dramatic. She goes so quickly from dead silence to screams, she doodles in class and makes up elaborate lies, she gets perfect scores on the tests, she tells the teacher how to teach the class.

    She thinks she rules the world, or at least she thinks she’ll rule it at some point.

    And perhaps she will.

    “Why are you crying?” Her voice is not sympathetic; it offers no comfort. It is cold and inquisitive.

    “I’m not crying,” I say, feeling five. I’m not supposed to start crying in public. That’s my daughter’s job. I’m not a little kid.

    But maybe we are all little children, once you peel away the chipped layers of paint that is our adulthood. Maybe I’m a little baby underneath it all, snug in my mother’s arms. My mother is dead.

    “You’re definitely crying.” She hugs me, but it feels stiff and awkward. I sob. She doesn’t feel eight. She feels a thousand years old.

    “You better?” she asks, her face that of the mother, not the child. That should be my face.

    I can’t remember acting like her as a little kid. I was always over-emotional, I cried over nothing and everything and danced at the slightest joy. But she is, she simply is. It is like she has always been in the world, like she knows how to be a mother better than I do, like she knows how to be an adult, but lives the life of a little girl. My own daughter is eternal, though I saw her come into the world. She had a beginning, but it doesn’t look that way.

    It’s going to be so terrible for her. She’s going to hate her teachers with a fury that I never could muster.

    I want to be the adult, but I just can’t, so I flee and lock myself in a bathroom stall like a middle school girl ready to commiserate with her friends.

    But there are no friends to share my troubles with. There is only my daughter’s feet, those feet I can see are waiting right outside the stall.

    For a moment, for an eternity, I am a child.

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[Marie]

THis is almost good. It kind of misses. But it's almost good.