Yesterday my 12-year-old son shaved for the first time because some kids at school were teasing him about a few hairs on his chin.

“But I didn’t shave my moustache off, Mama.”

My 10-year-old daughter has been writing to fairies forever. She’d leave the notes in the garden and the fairies would carry them off and leave replies in wee pink envelopes, often with illustrations.

While we were packing up for the movers. she discovered a pile of her notes to the fairies in a small plastic box. “How did they get there?” she asked me.

She is on the verge of losing her first molar. She got her first bra last summer, six months after she came into my bedroom in the middle of the night and told me she was worried she had cancer because both her breasts had quarter-shaped lumps in them. I told her she didn’t have cancer, that those were the beginning of her big girl breasts and the first  of  many changes on the way for her.

She accepted that information matter of factly and drifted back to sleep. I laid awake for a long time, thinking of my mother, who died of breast cancer, and of the fair-haired baby that I nursed until she was 18 months old, the baby that grew into a girl who still needed me in the night.

A little more than two weeks ago, my period was more than a week late, my breasts full and tender. I told my husband with a wry smile, “Wonder if I’m having your Love Child?” I watched the color drain from his face and noted he made no attempt to cover the terrified expression that followed.

Yesterday, only two weeks after the start of my last period, my period arrived again. I paced the vacant rooms of this house, pausing only to lean my back on the hot radiators and close my eyes against all the emptiness.

Next week, I turn 46. On the same day, I mark the anniversary of my sister’s death. She died when she was 33.

When my eyes slid open this morning and the vestiges of my dreams lingered, I remembered how just before the alarm went off, I was trying to escape a tornado that was bearing down on me. As I squeezed my body into a grassy ditch, I worried that even if the tornado missed me, I might be struck by lightning or crushed by the massive trees growing nearby.

The subconscious is an amazing truth teller.

January 23, 2008