“The life of a mother is the life of a child: you are two blossoms on a single branch” – Karen Maezen Miller, Momma Zen: Walking the Crooked Path of Motherhood
I’m heading out on a road trip tomorrow—a real, week-long one that will take me halfway across this country. Never have done anything like this before. But there’s the matter of this dress, and this young woman who needs to get her car to Houston, and her compulsive mom who has an obsession with putting things in order before she lets go of them. This is hard stuff, much more difficult than I could have imagined, yet somehow exhilarating. Like jumping of a cliff.
My oldest is getting married. At this point, all of my energy should be focused like a laser on the fourteen year old. I’ve been through four teenagers before her, and know they require constant vigilance. But, I’m not. Instead, I have a map out on my counter, hotel reservations, and a giant bag of gorp to sustain us on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Adventure calls.
You see, this one is the sentinel. She and I have been through things in a different way than the others. I’m the oldest in my family. I know the drill. It mostly stinks. Parents practice on you, use all their idealistic theories, bumble around, and expect more than is humanly possible. Then they go on to relax and throw the rules out the window with the rest of the kids.
I won’t be too tough on myself and expect that I could have done differently. It’s almost inevitable. You fall so hard in love with them, there’s really no escape. From the minute those little eyes look up at you; it is so powerful and unexpected, delightful and frightening that it knocks out any hope of making sense or following through on a logical plan. Parenting is loaded with emotion, expectation, and baggage from prior generations. I did my best. She did hers. She’s grown up, and it’s time for us to move on to yet another phase of our relationship. Problem is, I don’t have a clue. Again, in my parenting journey, I have theories, but haven’t lived it yet. Since my theories so far haven’t panned out, this is a matter of concern.
My mother didn’t make it this far with me. She died suddenly, eight months short of our wedding. No warning, 24 hours. Not what you call a smooth transition. I’ve been a motherless daughter ever since, which is something you don’t understand if you haven’t tried it. Trust me. There’s a club of us who had our wedding days and our babies, our sleepless nights with teenagers, and now are going through menopause–without the guide to show us the way. Even in my 50’s, it’s unsettling, and it frankly sucks when Mother’s Day shows up every year, no matter how much of a sport I try to be.
That means I have to make this up on my own. Just like I figured out how to handle wedding gifts, breast feed a baby, and the ache of leaving a child off at college for the first time. She and I can do it; we are tough. But that doesn’t make it smooth going. I think that’s why I ended up making the dress, the one that will be in the car with us. Apt that I put together, out of carefully chosen antique Italian silk, what she will wear on her special day. That she and I designed it, and altered it, and put it on and off of her probably a hundred times so far. That it has so many imperfections (my husband wisely told me to keep them to myself) because I’d never made anything like it before. Just like I’d never mothered before I had her in my arms. And my mothering has been so full of flaws that glare at me with evil eyes. But perhaps others don’t see. Or perhaps the final product needed those.
We will bring it safely to her new home, her new city, where she will raise her own family. Hopefully have her own daughters some day. It will take days to get there, not because we couldn’t do it quicker, but because I want to savor this time. In the car, together, uninterrupted, going to places neither of us has been to before. We will arrive at a place she knows well, and I have never been. She will shine. And we will both move on to the next part of this mother-daughter dance. New for both of us, which is sort of sweet, and awfully terrifying.