TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

Recently, while deleting old voicemails from my phone, I came across one from a number I didn’t recognize. When I clicked on it to listen to the message, I heard a voice I hardly recognized. It was my son, just two years ago, calling to check in from a friend’s house. His 11-year-old voice was sweet and high-pitched, very different from the deep voice he has now.

I sat down with my son and played the voicemail for him, and his eyes grew wide when he realized it was him. He asked me to replay it a few times, and we laughed. He teased me for keeping it. But I’m definitely not deleting it now! I love looking at old photos of my children, but videos and audio recordings are particularly special. Videos show us a person’s unique physicality, and sound bites bring back their little laughs, the ways they once pronounced words.

I love parenting teenagers, and I love my son and daughter exactly as they are now — growing into their own people, and both now taller than me! But I also miss the baby days, the toddler days, the elementary school days. I miss holding them and carrying them and rocking them to sleep. I miss pushing them on the swing set at the park and catching them at the bottom of the slide.

I miss the relationship we had when they were little, even though I wouldn’t trade it for what we have now. What we have now is beautiful and powerful, and there’s a different kind of closeness possible when your kids are older.

The memories are there, though. And not just in my mind. There is a kind of muscle memory to relationships, when we grow, age, and change together. This intertwines us.

Today’s poem makes me feel seen as a mother, and it also reminds me to stay present — to appreciate exactly where we are together, right now.

Versions of Girlhood
by Tina Chang

I listen to my daughter’s voice loop
from years ago. I miss her past self.

Her present self hears her own voice singing.
I love both girls who came from me.

I am the woman who made her, the woman 
so hard to love now, at times bitter to the bone.

Often, a grey demon bites my neck. Aging,
I salvage the drainage. Paint me gold again, 

hold me in your vice embrace, I say to a past 
that has already let me go. I pray to the night,

I pray to the orchard, I pray to the chill
and the underside of the moon, who shines 

its light so vividly, I feel crushed by beauty. 
I love this earth who greets me in waist high 

grass. My daughter is a tender shoot, 
mothered, until she is an orchestra of light.

Along the horizon, fire ripens into rose, 
softer with age, when my feet land on roots, 

which twist through me without force 
but fragility, without bitterness but belonging. 

“Versions of Girlhood” by Tina Chang. Used by permission of the poet.