MY GIRLS.

(sigh.)

On the left, Miss Gretta The Beautiful. When she was only one year old, riding in the backseat of my Hyundai, we pulled up to a stop sign before a highway marked “H”. She immediately pointed and said “The letter H”, just like they say on Sesame Street. By two she could identify Joni Mitchell on the stereo. She could read exactly two-and-a-half months after her fourth birthday, and bested me in vocabulary contests by her fifth. She gets straight-A’s on her report cards, with parents who never check her backpack….The thing is, it isn’t just what she knows, it’s what she understands. I’m constantly forgetting she’s only seven. Because seven, in Gretta-Years, is more like 24-ish. She giggles like an honest-to-god hyena, and no matter how mad I am, I can’t help giggling myself when I hear it. Her verve is contagious. I am daily outdone.

And then there’s Emma the Diva, on the right. Look at that condescending pose. (“What, you wanna take my picture? Go ahead. Take my picture.”) Watch as she mocks me, listen as she chuckles under her breath. When she came into this world two short years ago, she did the impossible: she followed up the Gretta-Act. (Who among us could pull that off?) Oh, but she has, my friends. She has. She came out of the womb with her hands on her hips. In her first hour of life she sent us on an ambulance ride to the ER because she didn’t feel like breathing. She wouldn’t nurse for two-and-a-half seemingly-endless weeks while I pumped and fed her from a teeny tube. She does everything her own way, in her own time. She is completely impossible, but in an entirely different way than Gretta. She lures you in with her sweetness, her shy shrug, her warm “I wub you!” Then she pounces. Our entire house is under Emma’s control, make no mistake. Even Gretta knows it. Just ask her. She only giggles.

I spend my days on point. Locked-and-loaded, if you will, waiting for the other shoe to drop. I coexist with them in a dissociative state, watching from above as they wreak their terror on some other poor fool of a mother. Part of me is horrified. But part of me (a bigger part, thankfully) worships the ground they walk on.

How did I get so blessed? I’ll never know.