My daughter’s prom was last weekend.
Popping over to her friend’s house to watch all the girls scurry about — music blasting, hairspray spraying, and eyelash curlers, curling irons, flowers, and left-behind dress sparkles flying this way and that, was a full blown sensory experience.
Parents who hardly know each other stand awkwardly in the living room making small talk, awaiting our moment to snap photos. We all search youthful and unrecognizable faces for kids we remember from our particular child’s elementary years, shocked at how they’d grown, and baffled by how quickly time has gone by.
They are little women now, both in action and in form. In heart though, we know they’re still our little ones.
At least, this is what we tell ourselves…
Caravans of parents and gussied up prom-ers drive on to Chautauqua trail, to capture the perfect moment, under the perfect mountains.
I watch as my daughter bobs in and out of friend groups, laughing easily, and looking like a 25 year old superstar in her sparkly pink dress. It’s amazing the difference between girls and boys at sixteen. Girls looking almost thirty. Boys, still praying for facial hair, and maybe passing for fourteen if they’re lucky.
“Mom can you get this angle. No wait, turn the camera like that, please.”
She trained me before we got there on how to get the right shots. Kids these days — so skilled at the selfie, at the perfect pose, at looking like the influencers they all emulate.
I think back to the disposable cameras of my era. How we had just 24 chances to get the right photo. We’d snap one or three for such a momentous occasion, then cross our fingers that we got a keeper.
I notice how soft and intentional her makeup looks. I think about those awkward, youngish teen years she spent watching YouTube tutorials to learn to do so. All of the girls, painstakingly, breathtakingly beautiful underneath the setting sun and the bold, purple mountains.
She is four years old. It is nap time. I am pregnant with my youngest, and my middle kiddo naps in his room. She is meant to stay in her room during nap time and play.
“Mom!” she calls from the bathroom. “Mom!”
I waddle down the stairs as quickly as my body, full of baby, can muster so she won’t wake her sleeping brother.
“What is it, Babe?”
“Look, Mommy!”
On the countertop sits the giant (now empty) tub of Vaseline. The large one. Costco-style.
“Lotion!”
I flick the light on and see she looks like a wet rat. Her hair slicked back, arms and legs covered in a thick layer of shiny viscous goo. She went to town on that damn Vaseline. It took 3 weeks to get it all out of her hair — no amount of shampoo could get that job done.
She smiles at me as I photograph her in another arrangement of friends, posing differently this time.
Where does the time go?
They drive off to go to dinner, and I corral a car full of parents back to our starting point. We don’t all know each other. But we’ve been through something together, now. An important snapshot in time never to be lived again.
I know that all night, I’ll be sitting on the couch thinking about her far more than she is thinking about me. Wondering who she is dancing with, talking to, kissing in the hallway, how much she’s drinking, who will drive her home, and on and on.
And my daughter, who used to call me to her for every Vaseline snafu, won’t spend a second thinking about me. Just as it should be.
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