This interchange, from Lost in Translation, was, in no small part, one of the reasons I decided to take the plunge and have children.
It does not please me that a movie character helped me make this decision, but he did. I listened and I thought, “Oh, right. Time does move on. You do not give birth to a child and then have that baby in your arms forever. They grow up and you get to meet them.”
In the depths of my PPD, I could not remember this. I could not remember that it wasn’t going to be “this way” for my entire life. I could not remember how to add things. On my worst days, I could not remember how to tell time. I was sure that I was never going to be independent in a very real sense again.
Now that I have “me” back, I think about the interchange between Bob and Charlotte and I now know that he was indeed telling the truth. My little girl is one of the most delightful people I have ever met. She is intelligent, curious, persistent, loving, outgoing and tiring.
She is her own person, but I can’t help but thinking that she is everything that I wish I could be. It could be that my job now is to help her become her own woman by showing her how we are similar but different. Helping her differentiate her own needs from mine. Allowing her to be independent when she needs to be and dependent when she needs to be.
This will be hard. I will fail. I need a mantra. One that I can repeat when I’m feeling lost. I’ll be thinking of that now for a while.
