By Ashley Holloway

“It’s like she speaks in cursive,” my daughter said as we drove through the quiet, narrow, tree-lined streets. The sun was just breaching the horizon, a bright red orb staining the sky a rainbow of colors. Red sky in the morning, sailor’s warning.

I marvel at this kid, this little sapling of mine who offers glimpses of the questions I hadn’t even realized I was asking. Maybe this is how it is supposed to feel as a parent, that there are pieces of her that will remain fundamentally unknowable, leaving me to wonder what that makes me? A queen with my paper crown, the center area of our Venn diagram diminishing ever so slightly each day.

No longer am I “Mommy.” My recent transition to “Mom” feels a bit like stepping off the train at the wrong spot, a gentle tug at the strands that bind us together, and I am slightly uncomfortable in this new role. Friends confide their children are languishing on the vine, yet here I am, clinging to the tether.

I remember being her age, standing on the precipice of adulthood, impatiently waiting for it to claim you as one of its own, willing it to come faster while simultaneously wishing things would slow down. Stuffed animals and push-up bras. And yet, am I not in the same proverbial boat as her, being a mother no longer needed in the way they are accustomed to, yet unwilling to shed this skin? Could the word mother be considered a Janus word, a word that means one thing, but also its opposite? Mother being both captive and captor. Mother as both friend and foe. Host and jailer. Creator and created…Did motherhood find me, or did I find it?

I try to drink in every moment of her in these stolen moments, despite the early hour and endless road. A commute in the literal sense. There is something about this space that allows for her voice to swing free, unencumbered. The pause between words creating space without seams; there are no corners in a car, no place to look but out the windows.

Taking my eyes off the road for a second, I sneak a look at her out of the corner of my eye; her multicolored hair hanging loose, Medusa-like from the open window, her left nostril punctuated by a silver stud, the shape of a skull. Applying Chapstick to her lips as she bobs to the too-loud music, she fills the space in the small car. Despite being in the driver’s seat, somehow it doesn’t feel as though I am driving.

Satisfied with the result, her lips shape a glittery pink moue in the mirror. “She’s just so…alive, like she is drowning in life, but not, like, in a bad way or anything,” she continues in a bubble of excitement, her own cup brimming. She is extolling the virtues of the latest in her string of exploratory dalliances, a constellation of past and future loves. She sits back; her arm floats on the wind through the open car window as we hurtle down the highway, a single wing to our earth-bound car.

The air feels as though it has been washed and cleaned. Our car rattles along the highway, purposeful without speeding. The fields pass us by, and I wonder how it is possible to see so many shades of green, how Mother Nature can create so many versions of the same color.

The sun rises higher in the sky as if someone were slowly turning up a giant dimmer switch all around us. Nearing our end point, my daughter is restless in her seat. She fiddles with the radio, finally settling on a country station. “Country rooooooooads, take me hooooome…” she warbles along to the music, her voice carried on the wind through the open window. I cannot help but scoff at the irony. As my season wanes, her book still waits to be written. A premonition of a marvelous not-yet.