WHY DID SHE HAVE TO GET SO GOOD NOW THAT SHE IS LEAVING?

Did the spaceship land?  www.huffingtonpost.com/tracey-jackson/countdown-to-let-go_b_193976.html

Or  did she do what Anthony B. Wolf in his book get out of my life but drive me and sarah to the mall first?  said would happen – eventually grow up and become a person you can spend real time with?  Or are we both so aware of the impending separation we are relishing each other for who we are and not picking fights and looking for faults?

 Is the fact that she will soon be without me giving her a sense of freedom so she doesn’t have to create one?  Am I so happy to have her here and so conscious of how few days we have left I’ve dropped all my niggly motherly comments and habits – like who cares if there are clothes on the floor?   Except wait – there are not clothes on the floor.

She has been such a delight the last two months it’s really like another person.

The snarky teenager has been replaced by a young lady who actually enjoys going out to dinner with us and our friends and joins in the very adult conversations. She has been helpful, responsive and kind.

If she had been the Tay of yesteryear – senior and junior year it would be oh so much easier to say good-bye next week. But now, I’m losing not only my daughter – but also my best friend.  
During an extremely difficult period in her junior year when we were yelling and screaming and she stormed out of the house empty suitcase in hand with nowhere to go, I followed her down the staircase and sat and wouldn’t let her leave. She was crying and I was trying to remain calm and she knew she had pushed me to some edge I had been pushed to too many times, but I was still there trying to talk sense, trying to get through, trying to help her navigate the labyrinth of adolescence and she said, “Why are you still here?  Why do you still love me after all this?”  

And I said, “I’m your mother, I love you, there is nothing you could do or say that will ever stop that and I’m not going anywhere, and somewhere beneath all the rebellion and the anger and the acting out is a lovely young woman I look forward to getting to know and spending time with and watch grow and become herself.  Somewhere deep in all the kicking and screaming is the person you will become and I know she is very special and very kind and very smart and I will sit on these stairs or in my room wherever I have to wait until she appears.

And then she and I will not fight like this and we will be close and kind to each other and I will love her like I loved the little baby you were and the toddler and the tween and even now in this difficult phase as hard as it is for you to understand I love you the way you are. I don’t always love dealing with you now, but I love you and I believe in you in ways that you don’t yet believe in yourself.”

She stared at me and stormed up the stairs.  Things remained volatile for some time, but as Leonard Cohen says, “The cracks are where the light comes in.” And that night I made a crack and a sliver of light squeezed in.

And now that young lady is starting to emerge and she is leaving.

I know she isn’t  “leaving me.”  She is merely taking the next step and going to school.

And like most parents, unless they are exceptionally cruel, I will never abandon my children, so until they burn me up and throw me in The Ganges I’m only a phone call away from either one of my children whenever they need me.

I look forward to the young woman and the young mother. I look forward to taking trips and spending time and helping her navigate the even more complicated labyrinth of twenties and dating and mating and parenting.

I look forward to having her in my life forever. Though I will miss the quotidian details of  life with her. And despite the fact I spend an inordinate amount of time looking at her in dressed as Baby Bop at the age of two,  I accept she can no longer be that person, that life goes on and it has to. 

And life has taught me oftentimes the hardest roads end up in the most spectacular places.

I’m blessed to have been given the chance to raise her and I feel blessed to help her off into the world.

I love so much my heart aches and that is the way it should be.

And as my husband reminded me last night – Boston is only a hundred and eighty six miles away.

Be Sociable, Share!

•