Column: An appreciation essay for my firstborn: Her wisdom, my treasure

When my oldest - Mary Catherine - was around 9 or 10 years old, she shared a room with her younger sister, Lucy. Everything matched: matching white twin beds, matching lavender checked drapes, matching bunny plates centered above their headboards. Bedtime was a ritual: talking, reading, praying and a final goodnight parting.

"Lucy, I love you more than anything," I whisper as I lean down to kiss her 6-year-old forehead goodnight.

She quickly retorts, "You love me more than Mary Catherine?"

After a pause, still confident that I meant what I said, "Well no … I love her differently."

"But if you love me more than anything," she reasoned, "doesn't that mean that you love me more than everyone else?"

My mind, simultaneously racing and slogging, overthinking and deconstructing the problem of linear logic and love, could only muster … "It's hard to understand …"

Mary Catherine, on the other hand, raising up on one elbow, leaning slightly toward center, "Lucy, they love us differently, but the same. It's like they love you six plus four and they love me seven plus three."

Quieted and appeased, Lucy nuzzled back into her pillow. Shawn and I paused, eyes a little wider, glancing at each other. "That's it, exactly," I said.

Mary Catherine, from a young age, seemed to possess a wisdom that came from a quiet place, a place of contemplation and reflection. She just knew things - apart from us, and in some cases, in spite of us. Her sage-like ways have been a source of joy and enlightenment as I have had the privilege of mothering her these past 22 years. I treasure the lessons she has taught me, lessons that endure and sophisticate, lessons that age with me as I discover new facets of their application in my own life.

Mary Catherine hit middle school and preadolescence at exactly the worst time, 2013-15, the time when Instagram and Snapchat became currency. Middle school is already the time when children begin to naturally distinguish themselves from their parents, to figure out who they are as individuals, to establish their values, their friend groups. It can be a time when parental fear transitions from visible threats to hidden ones, ones that are insidious and might slither off the sharp tongue of a classmate or blow chills of alienation from a cadre of junior high aristocracy. I remember those fears, the sadness, the malaise. How to engage, how to enter in, how to allay. It is a helpless feeling and one that fueled my prayers.

Having raised four children (still working on a couple), I have come to realize my tendency, often fueled by those aforementioned fears, is to superimpose my experience of a healthy childhood on my children's experiences. I was fairly gregarious and happy; therefore they should be fairly gregarious and happy. I liked Friday night football; they should like Friday night football. My favorite style of dance was hip hop; they will naturally like it, too. Not much conventional wisdom is required to realize the flaw implicit in this logic: My children are not little versions of me. Fated as our firstborn, Mary Catherine had to suffer the consequences as we cut our parenting teeth on her.

So when this intelligent preteen took to her room, the alarm sounded in the deep places. If I'm anything, I'm perceptive. I sense disappointment and loneliness; I notice the nuance of a strained smile; I detect the tilt of a pained posture. Was her phone the drug mule, smuggling poison into the streets of her heart? Was her friend deciding that today was not the day to be present? Was the pit of loneliness tempting her to believe nothing would grow there? It could have been any of those realities, and maybe sometimes it was all of them. But when I went to the door to check, to engage, to enter, she was often reading a book.

Oh, she's a bookworm, you might think; she just likes to read. And while that might be partly true, it's not the whole story. Mary Catherine has always been a good student. She's conscientious and curious, but she's not the type of person to get lost in a narrative just for entertainment's sake. The wonderment is that she retreated to her books in the midst of junior high chaos because she knew there was something there for her, something that consumed differently than the phone, something that enriched rather than stripped, something that didn't change with the fickle winds of friendship. She made a wise choice.

A few years later, we were traveling as a family, and as the girls in our family like to do, we were "shopping around," meandering in and out of boutiques and gift shops. It's a sort of sport to enter into a new shop, find a cute top or dress or maybe a treasure for my house that surprises me. As I had my eye on a few items, considering what I might purchase, I saw that Mary Catherine had a few cards in her hand.

"What did you find?" I ask.

"Aren't these pretty?" she responds, as she displays several beautifully handpainted postcards by a local artisan.

"They are beautiful; what are you going to do with them?" as I considered she might want to frame them for her room.

"Well, I thought I'd send one to Gi and Granddaddy, one to Papa and Gaga and one to the Mortons."

And just like that, she proffered a hand to pull me out of my consumeristic sludge. Here she was, a young adult, with little to no discretionary spending money, and instead of pining over a particular accoutrement, she was using her resources to think of others, to bless others. Never mind it was a postcard - who even uses those anymore - never mind you have to remember to write it - isn't there even a different stamp for those - never mind you have to know someone's address and actually mail them - who has time for that? This wasn't just a singular wise choice in the moment of purchasing; it required multiple steps of follow-through, all of which I would have sloughed off as annoyances to my otherwise joyful reverie of myopic shopping pleasure. Another wise choice.

Fast forward a few years, and I find myself on 92nd Street, the Upper West Side of Manhattan, loading into the Lyft driver's vehicle two almost-empty suitcases that will return home with me. It's the end of a three-day project: operation NYC transition - drop off and help get settled. Mary Catherine has finally arrived, both literally and figuratively. This is the dream; it's always been the dream: to move to New York, pursue her passion for dance and somehow bring healing and restoration to others … and likely to herself.

The tears ran unkempt in the backseat of that Lyft. I reflected on the many coming-of-age tears: when at age 8 she first spent a week away at summer camp, when at 13 she danced so majestically I melted in my seat, when at 18 she stood solid in her freshman dorm room ready to conquer, ready to explore. All were moments of fear and astonishment and pride alchemied into something sublime. The resplendent value of her choices continues to capture my admiration, to turn my eye. The fact that without regard for her summa cum laude status, her ability to hand pick any grad program or her executive skills that could run a Fortune 500 company, she saved three months' living expenses and moved to the city leaves me in a place of wonder. She has made another wise choice, one that is not safe or conventional or even rational but one that teaches me, her safe and conventional mother, to not simply dream but to believe enough in the dream and yourself to go after it. She went for it! She dreamed, she trained, she planned.

And now I wait expectantly to watch and learn from her next move. I often apologized that she had to be our first. She had to survive all the parenting books and all our eagerness. As a parenting mentor once advised after struggling through the dark years of raising young children, "Relax, they will certainly need Jesus and counseling because of you," and I know that's true. But it's not enough to say that we learn more from our kids than they do from us.

From the day this little blonde-haired Yoda turned simple math into metaphysics, I knew she was special. While she is chasing what some might consider a big, flashy dream, I know in the quiet places she struggles, she questions her decision, she wonders if this was the right move. I wish I could whisper the answer every time. Yes, you did it, you made the move, you chose wisely yet again. Even if you fall flat on your face and need to come back home, it's enough that you went for it. Her wisdom is my treasure, and I'm so thankful I got to be her mom.

I love you, Mary Catherine. Thank you for growing me up.

Sumter native and long-time resident Molly Matthews has four children and teaches high school English at Wilson Hall.