I got a text from my oldest daughter yesterday.  It was a photo of her new hat, and she asked, “Do you like my hat?”

I was immediately taken back to the days of bedtime stories, when picture books covered every side table and most of the bookshelves in our house.

A line from P.D. Eastman’s book Go, Dog, Go popped into my head.

“Do you like my hat?

I do not like it.

Good-bye.

Good-bye.”

The book is repetitive and silly.  And it’s about dogs. (Which is probably why it was a favorite among the three of my kids.) Dogs coming and dogs going, big dogs, little dogs, red dogs and blue dogs. The final “scene” is a dog party. In a tree of course. And the one dog who had been trying on different hats for another dog finally finds an eye-catching one:

“And now do you like my hat?

I do! What a hat!  I like it! I like that party hat!”

So as a reply to her, I texted back, “I like that hat.  I like that party hat.”

After a minute she texted back, “What a hat!” and the dog emoji.

I smiled.  She remembered.  And that made me so happy.  Because I remembered, so vividly.  I remembered her sitting on my lap or between my legs on the floor.  She was just at the right height, her head fit under my chin.  She’d be just out of the bath, with clean pj’s and barely dried hair.  I can still feel her warmth and weight against me and recall the scent of baby wash and shampoo.  I always breathed in deeply when we sat like this, imprinting the memory, willing it to last.  It was quite possibly the best, most soothing smell I think I’ve ever experienced in my life.

I wondered, did she remember any of this too?

I know that bedtime stories came at the most exhausting time of the day.  Sometimes they were a good exhausting- playing outside, or swimming all day, or building forts and doing craft projects.  Sometimes they were the kind of exhausting where you just wanted the day to be over- tantrums flung, naps were missed, and patience was short.

But bedtime stories were my most “present” part of the day.  A bad day could be forgotten- for the most part- or at least I could tell myself that I could put it to rest and look forward to a brand new chance tomorrow.  On a good day I was relaxed and happy.  Both kind of days seemed to amplify that present moment.  All that mattered was what I could feel and see, hear and smell- right then.  And it didn’t matter what kind of day we had, either of us, because that was how we would end it.

How much of that does she remember?  Does she remember the days when I wasn’t present?  Because I know there were those kinds of days too.  The days when all I could think about was the moment I got to be by myself, with no one needing me, no one depending on me.  I hope she doesn’t remember too many of those.

And now she is all grown up, adulting on her own in a big city.  And I have so many more moments to myself.  Middle daughter is in college, and Youngest Son is in high school- both are busy enough not to be home all that much, not needing me or depending on me all that much.  So I have lots of time to reflect and remember. 

Youngest Son loved Bill Peet’s Wump World. Sometimes I would try to steer him away from that choice because it was “too long.”  Sometimes I wish I hadn’t done that. 

Middle Daughter loved books about ballerinas and woodland fairies- because she was the former and she wanted to own the latter, like a pet.  And the more we read these books, the more she had her hands on them, the more true it became for her.

I loved reading the If You Give a Mouse A Cookie books.  The “train of thought” story lines were my favorite, how seemingly random things were connected to each other.  It’s kind of how my brain works. 

We accumulated so many books over the course of three childhoods that we ran out of shelves.  I’ve saved almost all of them.  Well, the special ones anyway.  I guess there are a lot of special ones, because some are in the attic, many are in the bonus room, and there’s a bookshelf in the basement that is spilling out onto the floor in piles. It took so many years to cultivate that collection of books that now I am personally attached to them.

Maybe that’s why I find it hard to part with them- they are my tangible memories.  A little like a photo book, but not quite. When I hold those books, the memories are clearer and more real to me. Picture books brought us closer together, physically and emotionally.  Maybe the emotional part is all me.  It probably is. I guess it’s all part of the job.

Good-bye.

Good-bye.