How do you spell attention?

Mom!

It’s been seven years, but I’m still getting used to responding to that.

How do you spell “attention”?

She appears in my office doorway. She’s changed clothes from earlier in the day, and is wearing a pair of soft navy pants and her favorite green shirt. The shirt has a polar bear on it, flopped over like it’s had a hard day on the ice floes. 

She’s lost her first tooth and I’m still getting used to the change. It’s a reminder that she’s growing every day, always growing, and I have to try to keep up. As soon as I think I’ve figured out an age, or a stage, or a phase, or an issue, it’s on to something else, like being pulled by a dog that’s walking faster than I’d like to go.

I spell it for her slowly, and she carefully prints what I say at the top of her paper as she kneels on the floor. The light hits the back of her neck and my breath catches in my throat. When is the last time I touched the back of her neck? I used to know it as well as I know my own hands, cradling her against me, swaying as I walked up and down the hall, hoping to lull her to sleep.

Her hand curls around the green marker as she carefully prints A T T E N T I O N. The Ns are written backward. I want to show her a better way to hold the pen, one that won’t stain her skin and smudge the letters. I’m left handed too; I should teach her this because I had no one to teach me. 

I start to give Parental Advice on The Best Writing Position for Left-Handed People but as soon as the breath of the first word passes over my lips, I stop.

I also don’t ask what she’s writing, as I’ve already learned that this is not acceptable. If she wants me to know something, she will tell me. I’m on a need-to-know basis.

She offers no explanation and disappears as quickly as she arrived. I turn back to my proofreading.

I correct things for a living. I take something newly born from another’s fingers and adjust it, smooth it, straighten it. It’s like making a bed with words. It’s nothing I’ve ever been taught to do; it’s the way I am. I look at a sentence, and even if I don’t have to, I fix the spelling and remove the comma splices and sew the split infinitives back together and tidy it. 

It is the only aspect of my life that is neat. My dressers are stuffed with once-folded clothes. Most horizontal surfaces are storage for mail, pens, mittens, art supplies, rocks that someone found on a walk. My desk teems with papers, notebooks, sticky notes, a coffee mug from Tuesday, a stack of books, two pieces of unchewed gum, a baseball cap, and four candles: pine forest, teakwood, citrus tea, and “winter.” I scoffed at the last (silently) when I received it as a gift; winter is not a scent, I thought. But when I light that candle I smell Vermont winter, cold and snowy, with the biting air and dying leaves.

Parenting offers a lot of opportunities for fixing. It’s second nature for my corrective life lens to want to tie my daughter’s shoes, correct her grammar, find a matching shirt rather than the clashing one she’s chosen, brush her hair for her because she missed a spot, show her how to use a measuring cup, explain to her how to ride a bicycle, demonstrate how to pump her legs on the swing. It’s what parents do… help their children learn and grow until one day they’ve learned and grown enough to do it themselves. 

Except I realized years ago that my daughter was born with wisdom, and each time I lecture her or correct her or take the pen out of her hand or change the way she ties her shoes, she loses something. And maybe I feel useful or “parent-like” or think I’m keeping her safe, but instead I’m making her life smaller.

It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done, to stop proofreading my daughter’s days.

As I’m rearranging sentences and changing “it’s” to “its,” she appears again in the doorway. 

Do you have tape?

I dig in my desk drawer and extract a plastic tape dispenser. Off she goes.

A moment later, she calls to me.

Come see!

The paper is stuck to her bedroom door at daughter height.