Instar
~for Esmé
The sound of you digging in the snack cabinet again makes me think of an article in Nat Geo that details the process of a caterpillar turning into butterfly. The author refers to caterpillars as cylindrical eating machines, since the reason they grow so fast is due to constant feeding. For the past year, your appetite refreshes on the hour, the sound of the snack cabinet opening a dependable measure of time. Metamorphosis feels more excruciating than magical. I remember.
In the article, I learn that a hormone spike prompts the caterpillar to spin a pad of silk, in which it embeds its cremaster (fancy name for hook) and hangs itself like a Christmas ornament. Upside down in its chrysalis, the caterpillar liquefies into a chunky stew, and specialized cells with the coolest name - imaginal discs - begin remodeling the goo into something new. Eventually, the cylindrical eating machine will emerge as a winged butterfly equipped to sip sugar from flowers with a proboscis that looks like a straw.
Your body grows beyond itself, sometimes overnight. You upped an entire shoe size in a single month, your jeans suddenly hovering above your ankles. When hormones dictate it’s time to turn into stew, I suspect you’ll find imaginal discs for eyebrows that connect at your glabella, as well as an aversion to working in groups. Pray you get your sense of direction from your dad, but desire to wear anything but a wrinkled, Canadian tuxedo from me.
Never again will you undergo such rapid growth in a short stretch of time! I feel for you, my burgeoning child, your brain flooded with hormones that not only remodel your kid-body, but whisper wicked things in your ear, telling you that everything I do is insufferable. The furious amygdala of puberty leaves you vexed when I laugh off your annoyance - a survival tactic I’ve developed that allows me to dodge the laser beams constantly aimed at the back of my head.
I remember being thirteen. Which is why I won’t stop having fun when you loathe me for no reason, sweet girl. But do attach your pad of silk to the red maple of my heart, where you can liquify while I protect you from harshest of weather. You’ll wake one day with wings, and I’ll be there with a wild bouquet of goldenrod, aster, bee balm, and bergamot. Perhaps then you will forgive me, without even having to try.