Looking back over the quicksilver years, it’s easy enough now to identify those many defining moments when my world as parent cracked open. “It’s a girl!”; “Hello? This is the principal calling - there’s been an accident”; “Mom, Nick asked me out on a date!”; “Guess what! I’ve got my own apartment!” “I hate you!”, “I love you” -- countless events, conversations, prayers and pleas - those emotional threads invisibly weaving the silken bond between parent and child. So fragile, so amazingly resilient, so immovably strong is this gossamer fabric woven in the unspoken, gentle dance of family life. We pull it tight around us, craving its comfort in the warm familiarity of a lifetime spent together when cold realities threaten at fate’s whim..
Today, a new moment to add, a new thread of color begins - “Mom, I’m getting married” One hears the songs, Sunrise Sunset, one watches the Kodak commercials, one acknowledges the facts of childhood’s swift passage without really absorbing it all, busy as we are with the day to day journey of family survival. As a single parent, the years of child rearing were always ones of hardship, heartache, a great roller coaster of up and down emotional wallops - time only seemed to stand still due to the sheer exhaustive nature of the task at hand. My independent streak silently screamed, "When will I get some time to read again? When can I sleep through the night again? When will I have any extra money for myself again? When will the worry stop?" My life loomed ahead as an endless string of unselfish responsibilities forced upon me and I looked forward to the time when I would have my life back. I loved my children fiercely, but their childhoods seemed, at the time, to be ignoring the “time passes so quickly” mantra of parenting. I felt heavy with the burden of them, with only my maternal love and their bright little spirits to buoy me during the process of getting through each day with my good humor intact. Yet, despite it all, I recall crying over the sentiments of the lyrics, “turn around and he’s 3, turn around and he’s 4, turn around and he’s a young man going out of the door”, yet not fully grasping the implications of truth found in the prophetic words. I grasp them now.
Time, that sly rascal, plays a tricky game with us. At the outset, with one’s entire parental experience ahead, time stretched out eternal in its hopes and possibilities. One sensed an endless road ahead, filled with all the time needed to right wrongs, reverse unfortunate judgment calls, and instill all of life’s goodness into the malleable clay of a child's spirit. Armed with immeasurable parental love, it seemed a cinch to carry forth and prosper at being the SuperSingleParent. Wrong. Somehow, and I can’t figure out how, time managed to maintain a false image of an endless tomorrow where we still had time to fix things, we still had time to savor the child’s presence. After all, look, he’s just ten, she’s just eight. Still plenty of time left. In fact, time seemed to slow, and they would stay small forever - I always had tomorrow. Then, of course, with the coming agony of teenagers, the sheer maddening chaos of it all, one wished for time to pass in an instant. The only thought of mother and child was to hang on by our collective fingernails until we reached the proverbial other shore of twenty years, a glorious number with nary a teen in it... But here’s where Time has his little laugh. While all are heaving massive sighs of relief, and giving ourselves hearty pats on the back for surviving this ancient battleground, we are slow to notice that in the last six years of crisis and turmoil, time noticeably sped up, somersaulting over itself in a rush to the finish line. In a blink, the end is in sight, the time for teaching, correcting past mistakes, for love’s touch has passed. It’s just not amusing at all.
So, I watch my second and last-born...twenty-four, blessedly human again, now marrying - with gusto. I find myself staring at her all the time, like when she was newborn. I drink her in, moonily mesmerized by the perfection of offspring, failing to quench a sudden and intense thirst for her face, her laughter, her company. “Mooom,” she wails, glancing at me sideways, catching my stare. “Quit staring at me! Why are you looking at me all the time?” We laugh, and silently acknowledge the need for this mother-child bond to Never Ever Stop.
As she begins her new life safely cocooned in the warmth and security of a man who loves her, I offer her up tentatively to the future that awaits her, hoping that the fates will be as kind to her as they've been to me in so many ways. I hope she knows that, as is the eventual way of all children, while Time may have moved her physically from my presence and Love has created a new, fledging family to which her attentions will be rightfully focused, that she and I are forever linked and blessed in a bond of shared histories, emotional and physical traits, and a love that goes bone deep.
I welcome Jeremy into this waltz of mother and daughter already in progress – he picked up on the steps pretty early for a guy, and I appreciate that he respects things enough to not want to change the music; just the order on the dance card, which is just right.
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Quote of the day: The martini tasted like John Coltrane sounds. Robert Parker. "Backstory"
Chosen because I love the brilliance of using one sense to describe another - Coltrane sets the tone..you just KNOW what the room looks like, the stage that's being set, the mood the martini is setting. So simple...wish I could think of things like this. I have shamelessly stolen this idea in a few things. Don't tell.
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