I got a call from my youngest daughter tonight. She is a newlywed, hard worker and radically grounded person. She also holds every little stress inside until she bursts forth with all the things that are getting to her. She has never had a life without challenges to handle; she has just been hyper-responsible about trying to take them on all by herself. This is not good for her, but it is her way. I have learned over the years that when things are hard for her, she turns inside of herself and goes quiet until she is ready to talk. Then a world of the sources of her challenges or hurt come out in real, frank, candid ways as she expresses herself in very clear terms. I feel so fortunate to know who she is, to wait patiently for those moments because she lets me know when they are, and I never want to ignore them. This is the thing about connecting with others--it is not taking advantage of others' good will, but at the same time being able to fully trust that they will not let you down when it really matters.
At this time in her life, she is in a radical transition from a person in a committed relationship to a wife. She is learning how to negotiate that role because she has always been independent and self-sufficient (maybe even to a fault). She nurtures others till she has little left to give. She remembers everyone on birthdays and other holidays and checks in regularly with family members, taking comfort in their support and love for her.
But my life as her mother has taught me that not only does she need someone who knows her well to listen and accept her, but also, when she is ready to talk, I've got to be there. She reaches these tempests at inconvenient times sometimes, but I don't care. We have managed successfully to speak to each other as adults as she has grown into her young professional and personal life. She has always been grounded, self-motivated and generally expected too much of herself, standing aside at times to a point of invisibility in order to allow other priorities to be addressed by others around her. In her marriage, she cannot make herself invisible to a husband who loves her like crazy. She is also interdependent, and that gives her a feeling of vulnerability because she cannot always lead and as well, knows it is not fair to wrap herself into that tight cocoon of inaccessibility.
Those are strategies she has always used to help her function and take the next step forward. She also has superwomanish expectations of herself. But I know that she needs soft places to fall and relief from her hyper-responsible shouldering of all that matters to her. It is hard to be so far away, but when we see each other, we make the most of the time together and have a lot of fun--she cracks me up. She's generally not chatty, but when she is, I know for a fact that she needs someone to care and listen. Other family members have helped me so much in that regard and stood in as surrogates through the miles, and I am grateful for it.
Here's how it also goes. After she has worked up every possible "mother concern" I can imagine, she "figures things out" and will call later sounding strong and sure. But that's just part of being her mother, and I am grateful to be held in that kind of esteem and trust by her. Ever since she was a little girl, she liked to be certain, to know what was coming the next day, whether it was for a school lunch or a new situation. When she was about eight, I had given her 12 hour Contact for a cold in the morning. We were driving in the car that evening and she asked me what time it was. I told her, and she said, "well that means in about 17 minutes my nose will start running." That is her through and through. Uncertainty and "newness" is hard for her until she works at something long enough to feel steady-footed.
She used to dread every birthday because she liked being nine and didn't know what it would be like to be ten. She used to dislike and mistrust her new elementary school teachers for the first two months of the new school year, and then in the last month, not want to go on to the next grade because she liked her teacher. She was always the "quiet", "on task" kid in the class and teachers would always seat her next to the rowdiest and hard to control child. After awhile this got to be a little old, and I finally discussed it with her teacher. She has a calming effect on everyone around her because she is so grounded; but she does this at her own expense because it appears as if she has no needs--for approval, love, concern, care, help with tasks, conversation and worries. Yet those who are closest to her can tell when she is beginning to unravel from that tight cocoon she has woven to protect herself from disappointment or challenges that lie ahead.
This is my youngest daughter, my beloved child, who when she hurts, I hurt, when she worries, I worry because I know that despite her strong habits and practicality, she is as human as any of the rest of us and has needs to be recognized, cared about, accepted and listened to. (Of course I feel the same way about my other daughter). Yet she and her husband have planned and budgeted and waited for the honeymoon of their dreams. She is facing circumstances that will not make the trip as carefree as it might otherwise have been when the planning began because she is facing some uncertainties. I hope she is able to relax and enjoy the relief from daily pressures she and her husband deserve, and that others will also recognize that she, too needs support.
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Ventures into virtual land
I admit I am a techno dinosaur. My laptop is slow and low on memory space. Maybe these first two lines parallel mid-life. Both of my daughters have recently married in the last two years. I am at odds with myself and contented at the same time. Is that possible? I began this blog in a technology boot camp that was our faculty retreat just days before the halls of our new building were filled with cute boots that college girls wear and the sounds of cellular equipment dinging, vibrating and rapping. Within the span of two years, I turned fifty, traveled to Africa, accepted a position as Associate Dean of a brand new School of Communication that had long roots in a small department I have been part of for eighteen years at an institution I love. I became a grandmother of a little girl, deployed thirty five students to mentor young girls, women and migrants from faraway places out of one of my classes, and traveled to two different states to stand in my role as proud mother of the bride. Alone. Their weddings were as perfect as my daughters are different. I cried unbridled tears at the ceremony where I felt like I was revisiting my former life with their father's family and loving them all, healing from an ancient divorce and regretting the unfinished business I have with the bride. The second ceremony signaled a "coming out" of shyness I had never seen in my younger daughter. I have not been successful in love, though I have loved and been loved; yet both of these beautiful young women, my daughters appear to have found their life's mates. I wish I could take credit for that, but I have no idea if any is mine and am grateful for their good judgement. My insides moved at the second wedding from fatigue, joy, a sense of completion, and overwhelming sentimentality at the simultaneous sight of watching my eldest nurse her baby, worry about a baby girl's fusses while cutting new teeth, and my youngest's embracing of her big, beautiful day that she had worked months to deploy with a budget spreadsheet, delegation of roles to aunts, uncles, parents, grandparents and her truest friends. I spent that day in two places very far away from each other--ecstasy and longing. I celebrated a beautiful couple's joy, likeness, practicality and sense of humor, watched my parents who are in their seventies dance for perhaps the first time in fifteen years. They came alive as if they had not suffered the loss of many dear friends over the past few years; they looked young and as I remember them loving each other in sweet and funny ways throughout my growing years.I felt the loss of my importance in each daughter's life as I watched my eldest fulfill her role as wife and mother, nursing her baby girl, feeling those early pangs of watching your daughter suffer, even if only from cutting new teeth. I felt like a woman cutting new teeth in suffrage and liberation at once. I was far away from my home in Chicago and close to the home of all that I knew as a child and young mother stranded between the whole of what I thought I might do with my life's future over five decades. I have failed miserably in some things and reached heights I never knew I was capable of. I finished a book manuscript over the summer that took me eleven years to write through the trials of tenure, raising teenage daughters and managing parts of my life that always seemed like bikes and ropes and water and steam that I tried to hold onto, but could never fully grasp.
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