Excuse Me While I Kiss the Sky
Our younger daughter missed the cut off for kindergarten by 10 days. So when her sister and friends went to school that year, we explained that she wasn’t 5 yet and would have to wait. On her birthday she woke early, put on her party dress, stuffed her Little Mermaid lunch box with an entire box of Fruit-by-the-Foot snacks and announced she was ready. She laughs about it now; back then, she didn’t. My heart broke a little too, though I was secretly glad she got to stay with me a while longer.
It seems fitting then that the same kid would watch her sister and friends head off to college ahead of her and I, too, would get to put off the day I had to leave her at school.
We spent Friday evening in traffic, and I remember us all commenting on a techno-fied Killers song playing on the radio. It died out just as our stuffed station wagon pulled itself over the last Southern California mountain and submerged into the deep darkness of the rural Central Valley. Many hours later at the motel my husband said he would not miss our mother-daughter bickering and, honestly, I have no idea what he’s talking about.
The next morning at her dorm we unpacked the car and put everything on her side of the room. We went to brunch and a farmer’s market. We got lost in the car trying to find a Target and we got lost on foot trying to find the bookstore. We helped situate her bed and desk just so and met her roommate. I’m sure by now she’s forgiven us for buying her snacks at the low-rent Grocery Outlet instead of Safeway.
Based on a subsequent cell phone call from her sister, the two of them evidently debated who left me in worse shape on their move-in day. In the dorm and the parking lot and the gas station restroom, I cried for the one I'd just left. But since then, I’ve grieved for both. Sitting with my husband in a highway Mexican restaurant that night, I wondered if the waitress could tell I was a mother in mourning.
Driving the rest of the way today, I mentally maneuvered to derail more crying fits with thoughts of the near future – one of limited grocery lists and a tidy house; work-free weekends and restful runs (eventually); lovingly prepared care packages and Thanksgiving reunions. There also will be no more mysteriously missing shoes, shirts or makeup, nor cars left in the driveway with exactly three ounces of gas. There will be loads of letters, but from our car insurance company (the day after one got a speeding ticket, the other managed two accidents within two miles of each other – that’s gotta be some kind of record). Worrying comforted me, as did the cerulean skies broken by the last of gray-tinged storm clouds as we cruised along the freeway, closing in on San Diego and listening to music from before we were parents. That’s when I got that feeling. You know the one. That sudden warmth as the day reaches out to embrace you like an old friend, squeezing out a few more drops of sadness and whispering in your ear: Everything’s going to be okay.
It seems fitting then that the same kid would watch her sister and friends head off to college ahead of her and I, too, would get to put off the day I had to leave her at school.
We spent Friday evening in traffic, and I remember us all commenting on a techno-fied Killers song playing on the radio. It died out just as our stuffed station wagon pulled itself over the last Southern California mountain and submerged into the deep darkness of the rural Central Valley. Many hours later at the motel my husband said he would not miss our mother-daughter bickering and, honestly, I have no idea what he’s talking about.
The next morning at her dorm we unpacked the car and put everything on her side of the room. We went to brunch and a farmer’s market. We got lost in the car trying to find a Target and we got lost on foot trying to find the bookstore. We helped situate her bed and desk just so and met her roommate. I’m sure by now she’s forgiven us for buying her snacks at the low-rent Grocery Outlet instead of Safeway.
Based on a subsequent cell phone call from her sister, the two of them evidently debated who left me in worse shape on their move-in day. In the dorm and the parking lot and the gas station restroom, I cried for the one I'd just left. But since then, I’ve grieved for both. Sitting with my husband in a highway Mexican restaurant that night, I wondered if the waitress could tell I was a mother in mourning.
Driving the rest of the way today, I mentally maneuvered to derail more crying fits with thoughts of the near future – one of limited grocery lists and a tidy house; work-free weekends and restful runs (eventually); lovingly prepared care packages and Thanksgiving reunions. There also will be no more mysteriously missing shoes, shirts or makeup, nor cars left in the driveway with exactly three ounces of gas. There will be loads of letters, but from our car insurance company (the day after one got a speeding ticket, the other managed two accidents within two miles of each other – that’s gotta be some kind of record). Worrying comforted me, as did the cerulean skies broken by the last of gray-tinged storm clouds as we cruised along the freeway, closing in on San Diego and listening to music from before we were parents. That’s when I got that feeling. You know the one. That sudden warmth as the day reaches out to embrace you like an old friend, squeezing out a few more drops of sadness and whispering in your ear: Everything’s going to be okay.
