A Lost Tooth + An Existential Crisis

We have our first lost tooth over here!

Eloise bit into a cracker during lunch at camp yesterday and out it popped. Thankfully she didn't swallow it because she thought it was a seed! She then proceeded to lose it twice more over the course of the day: once into a bucket of muddy water (recovered with the help of two camp friends) and once into the depths of our metal baby gate when she pushed it into an opening (recovered by her father and lots of gate-disassembling).

Disasters avoided—unless you're me.

This milestone was an unexpectedly big one. It made me SO EXCITED when she told me about it at pickup, and then plunged me into devastation as the day went on.

Call it pregnancy hormones, call it dramatics, call it motherhood.

My existential crisis began a few days ago when I read this article, then intensified yesterday after I read this one ("It was as if {she} wasn’t growing up, but growing down from someplace heavenly. Now {her} toes were just starting to touch ground."), and as the night went on it turned into a full-blown sobbing episode in which I nearly cried myself to sleep.

All my babies are growing up and leaving me!

I'm doing it all wrong!

I haven't done enough with her!

I've been too hard on her!

The magic of her childhood is over!

I'm simultaneously so proud of the creative, smart, thoughtful little girl she's becoming, and heartbroken that pieces of her babyhood are literally falling away and glimmers of her big-kid self are coming through.

So bittersweet!

But isn't that motherhood? Pouring ourselves into another human for years upon decades, with the end goal of them being able to confidently, capably and happily walk away from us at the end?

I didn't know until yesterday that the Tooth Fairy had puffy, swollen eyes and a penchant for the sentimental.