Today is her twenty-first birthday.  I'm ignoring the urge to write a treacly, sentimental piece about what these twenty-one years mean to me. How my life began the day she was born. How I never knew what love was until I had her. How she has been the best gift I could have imagined.  

Last night I dreamed about people moving. Packing suitcases, boarding buses, screen doors slamming behind them. I don't have a screen door. I wake up startled.  I reach for the alarm clock, and knock the small embroidered pillow off the bed.

 "Home is Where Your Mom Is"

Twenty-one years ago, I sat on the edge of the hospital bed. Perfectly still. Back straight. The doctor feels for just the right spot in my back to insert the needle. He comes back a second time, and then once more. I sense his irritation as he fiddles with the needle for the third time. He walks out of the room shrugging his shoulders. He leaves with this warning: Epidurals don't always work.

I remember thinking how astonishing the pain is. I remember thinking I will throw something at her father if he doesn't turn off the Lakers-Pistons game. As she utters her first cry, the doctor asks if we have a name for her. We answer at the same moment.

 No, not yet, he says.  Her name is Julia, I say.

I remember the first words I say to her as they place her in my arms. 

I sit in her bedroom as I write this, a little weepy and more than a little maudlin. Surrounded by books and dolls and spelling bee trophies and horse show ribbons and everything that was her life when she grew up here. Sometimes I scrounge around for something to wear in here. Faded "Green Day" t-shirts from junior high are all that's left behind.

Twenty-one.  A milestone. She will undoubtedly never live in this bedroom again. I keep planning to turn it into my writing room, my yoga room, my creative space. I write sitting on her bed.  I move my yoga mat in there. Small steps.

 She is bright and beautiful and funny and kind.  I miss her. If for nothing else, for her ability to make me laugh until I can't breathe.

 Still, she is twenty-one.  She will continue to move on and away because that is the natural order of things. She will always know I am here.

She will always know I am the one to turn to for unconditional love and unsolicited advice.

I am always here. Like the pillow says, Home Is Where Your Mom Is.

But she is forever moving on, moving away, and in my dreams, letting the screen door slam behind her.