High heels, hairdos and dates will never take away `my baby'

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

NEW YORK - I still call her "my baby," and she puts up with this and with me, with an understanding that goes beyond her 16 1/2 years. She allows me this indulgence, this solitary pretense, though we both know she isn't a baby anymore.

The knowledge for her is old. But for me, it's new. I have seen her through such myopic eyes. Even dressed up for a formal dance, she has seemed to me just a little girl pretending. All of the outward signs - her learning to drive, her staunch independence, the bedroom door closed while she talks on the phone for hours, the calls from boys, the flowers, the whispers, the cogent arguments about right and wrong, good and bad, the talks about college, about careers, about the rest of her life - should have alerted me to the truth.

But they didn't. She was growing up, I told myself. But I never once thought of her as grown-up. I never once saw her through impartial eyes.

The last five weeks should have prepared me for what I finally recognized Wednesday. But I'm a slow learner and I see what I want to see. I wanted to see a child in school for the summer, a child who would remain a child a little longer.

She left our flat every morning at 8 a.m. and took a bus to school. She met friends there, attended classes, read books and plays. But so what? This is what she has always done: left in the morning, taken a bus, gone to school, listened, learned and returned the same day.

The locale was different, and the school was different too, not compulsory but chosen, desired. But these differences did not register in my brain. It was the similarities, still school, only school, that assuaged me.

Stephanie, one of her friends, spent an evening with us a few weeks ago. At 16, Stephanie seemed a baby, too, though a baby Lolita, dressed in a very short skirt and stacked heels, on which she teetered. We walked to the theater, the three of us, down Broadway through Times Square, and men gaped at her and whistled, and I glared at them all, wondering how they could, didn't they see? She was only a child!

A few days later, at dinner, a waiter asked my daughter if she would care for wine with her meal. She grinned, and declined and, when he walked away, we both tittered. "Can you believe he thought I was 21, Mom?"

No. I couldn't believe it. She had her long, curly blond hair pulled back in a braid. She was wearing pale lipstick and mascara, no other makeup. She was dressed in kid's clothes, a short-sleeved, rayon jumpsuit and flats. Clearly, the man needed glasses.

But it is I who have had problems with vision. The truth has stood before me, but I have not recognized it. There have been times when this daughter has walked into a room and I've looked up and seen her older sister. There have been moments, when she has appeared unexpectedly - at the local mall, rounding a bend on the beach in Maine - when I have glimpsed the woman in the child.

But I have buried these things, dismissed them as phantasms of an imaginative mind. She was a baby still. Roller-blading. Riding her bike. Drinking slushes. Hugging Teddy at night. She would not be a woman for a long, long time.

Last Tuesday, she was walking home from school when a woman, an apprentice at a salon that styles hair for Vogue models, stopped her and asked if she would be willing to have her hair done for free. The woman needed someone with curls, she explained.

My daughter's appointment was for 6:30 p.m. the next day. I went with her, sat in another room, watched all the beautiful people, read and waited.

Who knows what I expected? Some derivative of Shirley Temple, I think. I didn't anticipate any great change.

And maybe there wasn't one. Maybe it wasn't as dramatic a transformation as I perceived. All they did, really, was pull at curly hair until it was long and soft and flowing.

But the change pulled at something in me. Looking at her, in person and in the mirrors around her, I could no longer deny what was so obvious. I was looking at a young woman, not at a child.

"I can't call you my baby anymore," I told her on the way home. "You are definitely not a baby."

"I know, Mom," she said. "But you can call me your baby. I don't mind. I can be grown up and your baby, too."

And so she is. And so she will be for always.