Three Rituals for Two Daughters and Their Mother

 

I needed a ritual. More than a hug goodbye in the dorm vestibule. Better than a sob as we drove away. 

The girls had chosen hundred year old Illinois schools: Nora, the enormous state flagship where her maternal grandmother matriculated; Mia, a tiny private liberal arts school in a tiny town near the Iowa border. 

Mia's return to college has the feeling of another small and hard won victory. She made lemonade out of her unplanned gap year by serving as the assistant director at a local youth and special needs adult service program in Glencoe.

And now they were going away, Nora in mid August, Mia a month later. An empty nest, all at once, and I needed a commemoration, a cultural practice to guide me in and through the moment. I'll always be their mother, but from now on I would be a long distance mom, phoning it in so to speak, sending my love instead of spending and spreading it in the home we shared. 

Where does my help come from? I lift my eyes to women who have kept my feet steady on the path. Sharon Olds has a poem about the return of her older children, all asleep in a hotel suite, and dear Sinead O'Conner also gives me mother wisdom in her lyric "Three Babies." 

I'd been humming Sinead's propulsive dirge for days, ever since she left us, too soon, too soon. I kept her songs on repeat while I tackled cleaning out the garage on one of those precious long last summer days. I only knew a few of the words. The most important words, actually, "The face of you/The smell of you" and what expression could better bear the intensity of deep and instinctual and primeval Mother Love? 

But there is another story in her song, buried beneath her obscuring keening --- with the phrases "I'm like a wild horse" comes the clue and the "I know they will be returned to me" falls with a devastating weight. I translate into the gut wrench of "DCFS."

But despite Sinead's pain (or perhaps because of it), she left me and all of us so so many gifts. One of them is this: With the girls leaving, I can interpret her poem for myself, set myself in her anguish and also the prevailing hope of another tearful reunion.

Mia joined me in the garage to help me sweep up the broken pots and untangling the mismatched Christmas lights. We spelled each other, taking turns tossing and sorting. I'm trying to keep as much as I can from the waste stream ("What if nothing is waste?" was the mind blowing slogan on the side of the garbage truck) while my dear girl is exercising her new found skill to let go and let goodness. I take her broken shards from a kiln failure out of the trash and sprinkle them in the gravel of the passthrough to the alley. Organics get dumped into another back corner of the garden, behind the overgrown mint and autumn clematis. And there, tucked away and undisturbed, was the dead baby rabbit. Unbloodied and whole, his eye still shiny but still. He could have been resting. I gasped and called for Mia, who like me, cooed with pathos at the pitiful sight. Flies were starting to gather on his fur so I suggested a burial. We'd recently uncovered the big metal shovel in the tool pile. 

"Yes!" said Mia and told me about a Youtube video she'd seen that taught her the spot where an animal is buried may lay bare for a while: "The earth's process of grief" she called it, while later the fertilizing will kick in and nourish away. 

I dug a shallow hole next to where he lay, handed the shovel over and Mia gently slid him in. 

"Let's say a few words," I suggested, swept up in the play rite, and "Thank you, Rabbit, for delighting us when you played in the yard, even though you ate my hostas and the coneflowers" 

Mia covered him with the loose dirt and my ceremony took care of itself. Thank you, little baby, goodbye, goodbye.

I will always be their mother, near or far, and Bernadette's continual mother of me endures, not through any supernatural intervention, but through my inheritance: the blood and bone and DNA and laugh and nose and eyes and flank and smile and love of children and their education and growth. And the sacrifices I have made and will make. 

Thank you, Universe, for sending all the things as I need them. Even if I get impatient, often, waiting.

*****

Nora had also joined me in the garage the first day I stared the dusty, cobwebby task, but not voluntarily. Earlier that day I was standing alone, looking at the two kayaks resting on the dead-leaf-strewn floor and knowing from experience that by myself, I could lift the end of each one into the looped strap hanging from the rafters, then slide down to the other end and finagle it into the other loop to store it overhead. But I wasn't feeling it this time. 

Nora was finishing her breakfast in the kitchen. She was leaving in a less than a week. 

"I need your help."

"Let Mia do it." Mia's recycled canvases for the plein air landscape workshop she's leading tomorrow are littered across the living room floor, half gessoed and prepped. 

"Mia is working for her work," I reply, frustration mounting.

"Ask Dad!" Nora insists.

"He's working." Randy glances away from his screen set up on the dining room table to give me a "Don't get me involved" look.

Nora heads upstairs and my chest tightens up.

"Nora!"

"Don't yell at me," still ascending. "I won't help you if you yell at me."

And that power move snaps my last nerve. I pound up the stairs behind her, up to her now locked bedroom door.

I call, "You have to do your share! You have responsibilities since you live here. If you say no, I'm going to say no next time you ask for the car!" 

It's a petty fight. I'm tired and sad and so tired. They are leaving. When will they leave? How badly will I miss them?

Randy and I don't punish, we don't deny, and I don't really think of the car as belonging to any one of us. But I'd already lost my cool and when Nora pleads through the closed door, "Don't yell at me! I can't stand it when you yell!" I call out my parting shot. "I AM NOT YELLING. I AM TALKING LOUD ENOUGH SO YOU CAN HEAR ME THROUGH THE DOOR."

I knew I was playing the villain but she was the one not helping me. I go back to the garage, take a breath and lift one end of the blue kayak. 

"Blue Bayou" is the name I've given her, inspired by a paddle that Mia and I took down the Chicago River last week. The red boat is the punny "Cinnamon Bark" and wouldn't it be pretty if we had their names painted in script on their bows?

If I hook the t-shaped plastic handle of Blue Bayou's tether strap into one of the loops hanging from the ceiling, the prow will stay suspended so I can get the point of the stern into the opposite loop. Then I can go back to the front end and lift. It takes a few tries, I can't see the loop and my grip is awkward. I've dropped the boat a couple times doing this solo. 

I've got her up and secure when Nora appears in the doorway.

"Oh honey," I say, "I'm sorry..."

"Don't you fucking apologize," she says and bursts into tears. I'm shocked. She's taller than I am now. She goes out with her friends to restaurants and a couple of times to dance clubs and once a waiter told her and two of her friends that the family next to them (well, actually, the dad of the family) had bought them dinner. It's like that old chestnut image I had drawn on the chalkboard during summer school in June to illustrate the vocab word "ambiguous." A vase or two faces? Was the dad a creep or a caring stranger? Both? Was I a monster or did she overreact? Both? Is she a child or a teen or a college freshman or a young woman or all of the above?

"Okay, okay," I acquiesce. 

I might be right but she's in real tears. And she is here, helping me. She holds up the red stern and I slip the bow into place. It's so much easier with her than without her.

"Thank you, honey" and she leaves and I worry for the next couple of days at the strength of her emotion. There's so much she has only hinted at, so much friend and boy drama. And she was leaving very soon. 

*****

One more ritual. 

Nora had launched, beautifully to my proud eyes. Mia had a few more days here at home, finishing up her job and her dog-sitting, packing and recycling so much of the extra t-shirts and craft supplies from her stuffed closet. 

I'd offered my cousin Sally and her hubby Erik a ride home after their return from a month in Denmark. Mia loves them both and wanted to return to a weekend in Saugatuck, but the packing boxes that Nora filled so easily remained unfilled in the chaos of Mia's room. 

She stayed home with Randy, I drove Sally and Erik back to Michigan, and I would be back by Monday to drive to Mia's school. Yes, yes, it was Mia's last weekend with us. And I still needed to take this road trip I had been looking forward to.

Sally and I chattered so furiously on the ride that I missed three exits. Exits I'd taken dozens of times, lol. The next day we hiked the Crow's Nest Trail along the crest of the Baldhead dune, past the Oxbow art colony, out to the overlook with the Lake Michigan spread before us. Sally's hiking group is a fast-moving, fast-talking one but I kept up and loved the conversation about the mansions on the river and their eccentric denizens. 

A couple of hours later I was on the way home, but our morning hike had not been quite enough beauty of this gorgeous summer day. I dallied in farmland before hitting the highway, picked some apples, a pint of raspberries and a box full of nectarines at Crane's Upick (not to be confused with Crane's Orchards across the street, lol), then re-found a goat farm I'd taken the girls to years ago. 

The farm's cheese shop resides under the trees in a tiny shack between the gravel parking lot and the goat pasture. All was quiet. Was there cheese today? Were they closed? I opened the door to the shop and found a loud crowd of shoppers vying for the French herb chevre and cow's milk "Poet's Tomme." 

I laughed and said to a couple nearby, "I thought I was in the middle of nowhere!" 

"So did everyone else!" and we laughed together.

 The last time I was here with my little lovey girls, I asked Mia to hold the camera and I vamped in front of the wire fence in front of a sow. It's a little shtick of mine -- I've va va voomed in Mexico in front of a herd of coatis raiding a row of garbage cans. This time around, without my little giggling audience, it's not quite so fun.

An hour or so later, I was part way back to Chicagoland, but still jonesing for more soaking up of the day.

I pulled off the highway at New Buffalo and made my way to the beach. "FULL" said the parking lot sign but I turned in anyway, counting on the late afternoon nap exodus, and found a spot, no problem. More challenging was the line into the one women's bathroom so I made a fool of myself contorting into my tight striped two piece swimsuit underneath my sundress. 

Crowds and crowds on the boardwalk, on the sand, in the waves. I walked on and on along the waterline, smiling at the babies and toddlers, grooving to the drifting gusts of music from clusters of lawnchairs. Found a spot almost to the edge of the public beach, where the sign says "All Long Haired Freaky People Need Not Apply PRIVATE PROPERTY." Dumped my stuff next to a group of collegey kids and entered the surf. The sensation was delicious -- the water was only a few degrees cooler than the air. But the waves, the waves, the lift of the waves, that was what I played with. Floating and sculling with those old water ballet tricks I learned at Girl Scout camp, I locked my knees straight and lifted my pointed ballet feet up out of the water, wiggled my toes and splashed forward into a somersault. 

The water and me, playing. Mother Michigan lifting me up in her arms and then swinging me down. Wave crest and trough, over and over, in a dancing game. 

I didn't want to leave. I didn't want to leave the water. I didn't want to leave the moment. 

I tried to pull myself out, leave the weightlessness, drag my heavy body back onto the strand. No luck -- I dove back in. 

"Oh!" I said, probably out loud.

Here's what I came here for -- the revelation. This in-between moment and this in-between place, is "liminal space" what they call it nowadays? 

There was another moment, long (and yet not long) ago, when I didn't want to leave the water (Jesus, the connection between these two bookends makes me flush) -- The night the contractions began and I took refuge beneath the warm tap water in our big white clawfoot tub. 

Randy and I were living in a bank building on California Avenue in Chicago and he slept on while I breathed through the contractions, closed my eyes and practiced the giving in, the giving up, the limpness and heaviness that carries a laboring mother through the waves of pain.

I didn't want to leave the tub, but when the pain started to overwhelm me, I had to wake Randy. He was all action, go go GO, excited and happy, ready to drive to Northwestern. I, on the other hand, only wanted to go back to the tub. I slipped into my internal work; managing the pain took everything from me. The water was my relief -- when Randy urged me to step out and dry off, the whole world became rock hard and gravity increased me ten thousand pounds. 

Palmer jokes to this day about how he thought we were all ready to go, then turned around and found me back in the tub. 

Finally, I gave in. I left the water, stepped into clothes he had found and walked out of our home. No checking for keys, alarm, lights, luggage, wallet, nothing. Just walked away from my old life.

And twenty years later, here I was in the water again. But this time the pain of leaving was facing a world without my girls in my daily life. Being the mother from far away instead of holding them in my arms, seeing their beautiful faces close to mine.

And yet. And yet.

Here's the secret that shhhhhh (mothers who love and sacrifice are not really supposed to feel...) DROP DEAD EXCITED. I AM THRILLED. (shhhhhhh!)

Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron's 2001 blockbuster film Y Tu Mama Tambien (And Your Mother Too), Oscar nominated for Best Original Screenplay, hides a profound mediation about friendship, love, lust, and mortality within the framework of a roadtrip sex romp: Two randy teen boys go with an older woman to the beach.

The film closes with a bang, but gives us an even more devastating penultimate scene in the moments before.

Watch, watch, watch the entire film, please. Then relish in a magically designed moment of silence broken by the percussion of water on our ear drums as Julia dives beneath the waves and emerges baptized. 

The narrator tells us, "She stayed behind to begin her exploration of the local coves. The last thing she told Tenoch and Julio was: 'Life is like the surf, so give yourself away like the sea.'"

Harm

 

 

Years ago, before either of us had children or spouses, I slept with an old friend. The morning after, we went out to breakfast in Ravenswood. We were bleary with lack of sleep and the coffee tasted good.

He would call me once a few days later, with gentle consideration, to check in. He was teaching film in Texas, he had only been in Chicago for a weekend shoot, and we both knew that our one night was spurred by little emotion more than curiosity and nostalgia for our graduate school days. We would exchange nothing more than Christmas cards in the ensuing years, but I appreciated the kind gesture, and the closure, of that phone call. 

But that morning after, in the red vinyl booth of the diner, he flashed his charming blue eyes at me and called me the most dangerous thing in his life of late.

"Me? Dangerous? Oh, I'm harmless," I laughed and I truly felt that way with this friend, as edgy as our friend talk had always been and as adventurous as our gymnastics were the night before. 

He had nothing to worry about with me. I knew, and I might even have shared with him, that I was capable of romantic obsession and desperate dramatics in the name of love and longing. Not so here. His curly red locks did remind me of the perennial object of my heart, but I felt a hollowness here that would somehow avoid being damaging, probably from his careful courtesy, and that one kind, short, final phone call.

****

Last week the therapist said "You know, Cindy, you can't avoid it," when I trotted out that old canard "I don't want to hurt anybody," and I nodded, ever the agreeable student, switching gears to supply an example, "Yeah, like 'want to go to lunch?' 'Oh, I'm sorry, I can't' and you can hurt someone's feelings without meaning to."

But the therapist is also touching on something deeper: Being a mother -- or a wife -- or a teacher, friend, any meaningful relationship really -- brings with it the risk of imbalance in the power and tenderness and measurement of love. 

"Do I love them more than they love me?" The question can hurt you or you can take pride and comfort in your larger heart. 

Or you can go a little crazy (see "Obsession" and "Dramatics" above).

****

The bleary breakfast memory of my friend calling me dangerous came up when I re-read two Sharon Olds poems this morning: "Looking at Them Asleep" and "Sleep Suite." The two are companion pieces, a mother watching her resting children, first when they are small, and in the later poem, when the son and daughter are "nearly-grown," "in a little hotel suite."

Olds' eye is so sharp, her words so precise, the moment so tender, that mothers will gasp with recognition. Do we all watch them sleep, take a moment to forgive them in their unconsciousness and vulnerability?

So grateful I am for the communion with a mother poet who sings my life with the words "I roam in the half dark, getting ready for bed. I stalk my happiness. I'm like someone from the past allowed to come back, I am with our beloveds, they are dreaming, safe."

But there is another phrase that strikes deep within me as she describes the power and safety of this scene, this place: "it is broken, the killership of my family, it is stopped within me, the complex gear that translated its motion."

Olds came from a family of brutality, her father not only alcoholic, but Calvinistically abusive to his children and his wife, who was not able to protect her children from his wrath.

I too have a "killership," a legacy of caring adults who kill in accidents, who hurt without intention, who leave devastation in their wake. I fear at times that it lives within my genes. 

Olds offers me forgiveness and hope and endurance, of course, the pattern of harm "broken" and "stopped" by a moment of peace and rest, a moment of many that leads down the new path, where children grow up and all is well. 

Thank you, Sharon. Thank you, Kyle. Thank you, Mia and Nora and Randy, for breaking the patterns of the past and walking with me toward something better, something far more safe. 

 

“Baby”

Randy and I drove Nora to Champaign last week to move into her dorm. It was time. She'd wrapped up her work at the fancy pizza place, she'd sifted and selected and packed her stuff, she'd had a fancy dinner in Chicago with her big sister, her friends were already off to their own schools. 

From me, she had been pulling away for some time. I knew that her irritation was developmentally appropriate. It still hurt, but I knew that we could all look forward to some peace when she was safe at school. And all these words fail because there is no expressing how wondrous she is to me, as much so as when she first arrived in that Evanston hospital room.

The day of, there were some tears when she hugged her big sister goodbye on the sidewalk, but I had a Zoom scheduled during the ride down so Randy and Nora talked quietly in the front seat while I went to a work call. Nora did the driving through the cornfields. 

Her dorm is a bland four story mid-century, retro-fitted with window air conditioning units. When I saw the signs welcoming students to the Global Crossroads Living and Learning Community and saw the beautiful student names on the dorm room doors, I had to smile at the beautiful place she had landed, but it wouldn't be until Nora's second day that she texted how suprised she was and how much she loved being in a super diverse dorm and how welcoming everyone was. She would send a pic of a map with pins where all the kids hailed from, with lots in India and China and one in Madagascar and northern Canada and California. 

But that day, during drop-off day, her eyes were full of her new empty room, its closet, its possibilities. We only needed one trip up with the wood cart, easy-peasy. I whipped out the Clorex wipes and started on the top of the air conditioner and the desk until Nora asked me to please just stop, she couldn't right now. We were all happy to have an excuse to leave her tiny space and drive down the street to the cute coffee shop I had found during our first visit in the spring. I chatted up a friendly professor in the line, we ate our sandwiches, then drove by the mini-Target in the business strip near campus for conditioner.

We would circle around looking for parking, but once we were driving back in the direction of Nora's dorm, we bailed on the shopping trip. 

There was only one thing left for us to do. 

"I can get the conditioner by myself later," said my dear tiny daughter, my five foot seven cheerleader, my supporter of the cheer pyramid, my base, my lifter of small flyers, my love, my youngest grown to honorable womanhood, my wise young woman of our creation, my child, my baby. 

We passed the Sigma Nu house on the way back. "Oh, they're the big partiers," I warned. "Stay away from the Sigmas!" There's a tiny block of green woods between her dorm and the quads. She may walk here, under these trees, on her way to Black History 1619-present or Gender and Sexuality in Greco-Roman Antiquity. 

Back at the dorm, Randy and I got out of the car with Nora, but there was no more parent work that needed to be done in her room. 

We decided to say goodbye in the front hall, we hugged and took pictures, and she was walking away, and she closed the door to the halls behind her, and I couldn't see her anymore, and my body started heaving. Randy and I walked outside without talking and sobs convulsed in my gut and moved up to my hard chest and out my choking throat. 

The grief was beyond my control and so was my body which couldn't move toward the car but had to stumble over to a place beneath her window, down on the sidewalk beside the giant cottonwood tree where I searched above for the window holding my baby. 

I wasn't sure which room was hers. I texted her a note to come to the window. She did, but first she snapped a pic of my wandering on the sidewalk, a glimpse of a woman on the brink of a new life. Like her, but also not.

She came to the window and waved at me. I waved back and it was all I needed. Now I could go.

Big Plans

By my second reading of Jonathan Frantzen's The Corrections, my impressions of most of the family complication fell away and the last line remained foremost in my mind: "She was seventy-five and she was going to make some changes in her life." What an amazing sentence.

Time is the answer to everything, isn't it? "Had we but world enough and time..." says Andrew Marvell to his "coy" mistress who may be buying time, rather than biding it.

From Futurity magazine, via my principal, here's "Study Debunks Myth of the Fast Learner." What if I'm only now learning what most of you learned as children? What if I never learn what you know so deeply, you can barely express it? No, says Futurity, you're not behind. You just think you are.

What if we actually know the truth so deep down in our bones that it goes without saying: Love is the answer. Truth is the daughter of time. Practice kindness and compassion and joy in all things. The struggle is real. Black lives matter. Each breath is a precious gift. Focus on your breath and make your exhale longer than your inhale.

Nora is leaving and Mia is making noise about following her out of the nest.