I am sitting in my living room, where someone has taken the maroon ottoman from beside the coffee table and put it back next to its chair in Jim’s office. The card game deck, however, is still sitting here. If it had been up to me, the ottoman would have remained out of place, and the cards would have remained upturned in four little piles. That is the state the kids—my three and my daughter’s boyfriend—left this place in on Thursday morning when I told them it was time to leave for the airport. Cecelia had to get to her first semester of college.
Jim’s informal nickname for Cecelia is “Can We?” because that is her standard opener. Can we have a movie night with cousins? Can we go see the sunset and get Ayelada? Can we check on Granny, I can’t reach her. (Granny is fine. Cecelia is a worrywart.) Then, around 11 a.m. on Thursday morning, she asked her last “Can We”: “Can we play a game before we go?”
Now she is gone, and I have replaced her as the resident “Can We.” “Can we get your address?” “Can we get some photos?” “Can we get a photo with you in it?” “Can we FaceTime later today?” It is similar to the way I felt 18 years ago when she came to life, and I lived in a state of anticipation of her needs. I am in her thrall once again, but now it is her holding me instead of me holding her. I am held in suspension and won’t be let down until December 18, when I return to Newark airport to collect her.
When we say anodyne things like “So and so made me a mother,” we do what we do with a disaster of a room before guests arrive. We shove everything into a big closet so it is filled precariously from floor to ceiling, oozing half-eaten ice cream. We close the door and present the public with a neat phrase, a clean emptiness.
The making of a mother is cataclysmic. It is an earthquake-for-two that shakes the world and leaves it permanently transformed. My first baby changed everything, but nothing so fundamentally as where I put my attention. My arms, my eyes, my heart were trained on her. On the soft, peachy fuzz covering the top of her head. On the inordinate care it would take to ensure that the world could not access the vulnerable soft spot there. On her pale, delicate arms, on the bowed legs that curled instinctively into a ball. On the one-sided nature of her right cheek dimple, unmatched by one on the left. On the bottoms of her impossibly small feet, wrinkled like an old man’s. I have pictures of my daughter from this time, but I don’t need them. I can still close my 52-year-old eyes and see, feel, hear, and smell my first baby in her seven-pound, seven-ounce state. I can still visualize how she would have been shaped inside the womb. I can’t do that with my other two kids.
A mother sending her child off sets off the earthquake’s aftershocks. One morning 14 years ago, I tried to send mine off to preschool. It did not go well. She refused to get out of her car seat. She clung fiercely to my neck and refused to let me leave. She screamed in my ear. It took half an hour to get her through the classroom door. I drove away weeping, heartbroken, and so relieved. (My difficult advice for moms now contending with this scenario: Have faith in your kid, and if you can’t find faith, fake it till you make it. They need you to believe they will be fine as much as they need breakfast.)
Five minutes and 14 years later, it is a Thursday afternoon at 4 p.m., and I am standing awkwardly at United’s security line at Newark’s Terminal C with the four kids who had just been playing cards at the coffee table. My attention is trained on a beautiful woman with long blond hair, who is fighting tears. I initiate a rough hug because her attention is trained entirely on her boyfriend and I am not sure she will remember to hug me, too.
A few days later I am cycling through feelings. Loss, irrelevancy, foolishness, jealousy. I am jealous not because I am no longer the object of her affection—I got over that long ago—because I thought I was the one in the house who got to fly off for adventures. What do I have to replace her in the house, in the car, at the dinner table, in my life? There is nothing. I could not fill the void she has left with anything or anyone because people are not replaceable. But she was not born to fill a void in my life, she was born to live her own. This is the wisdom that comes from years of practicing the art of letting go. This is the wisdom that has me seeing my own nearly-88-year-old mother as nothing short of a marvel. When I was young and she was a few years older than I am now, we awkwardly embraced in an airport foyer and I turned in the direction of my adventure. I left her to watch me go. I was heading off to spend not four months away, but two years, in Papua New Guinea. I can’t believe she let me do that. I would not let me do that.
Ah, my girl! My baby! You arrived via an emergency, when I was numbed and sliced open and then there you were. There was a You for the first time, a You in my arms with an angel face and halo of white fuzz, and you were perfect and I was a wreck and in no state to care for you. But still they saw fit to send us home together and we learned how to do it. You cried and I responded to your cry. You were hungry and I fed you. You were dirty and I cleaned you. You were cold and I warmed you. My attention was trained on you, and, for a long time, yours on me. Now your attention is rightly trained on how to go about the making of your life, and I am here alone, still digging through that overstuffed closet.
