dynamic elf

I forgot about livejournal for a while there. I still love this place. If you've written sometihng interesting, recently, please link me to it in comments; catching up is hard and seems impossible.

So, N is 9. Very 9. 9 all over the place. She has crushes. Her body is starting to change. She's still full of ideas and plans and jokes, but I can see her adult self beginning to poke out here and there; I can't quite say why it makes me teary-eyed, but it does. It's sort of like staring the beauty of the universe straight in the face - I flinch.

It's not that she herself is beautiful (though she is), or that I am nostalgic for when she was littler and I could scoop her up and make the world stop (though I am) - it's that I am beginning to see so clearly the passage of time and the cycles in it. I see that this is who I will be ceding the world to, just as my parents did to me.

She commented recently that she didn't understand "happy tears". Tears, yes! Happiness, of course. Emotions too big to contain, all the time. But she does not get why an excess of happiness makes adults cry. And I'm thinking - when are the times that happiness makes me cry? I think they're all inflection points and times of transition. It's change. Change makes me cry: weddings, divorces, coming-of-age narratives, funerals. Watching someone step into their own power. A child growing up. A friend, drifted away.

And maybe change makes me cry as an adult, but didn't as a kid, because every change has a bit of loss in it, even good ones. And loss changes shape as you get older.

So I don't know. Sometimes, when she asks me a complicated question, I'm able to knock it out of the park. And sometimes I flounder. I'm quite certain I did not manage to convey in any way why adults cry when they're happy sometimes. But I haven't been able to shake the question, either. And I keep coming back to: I don't know, kid, but some day maybe you can figure it out and tell me.