Growing Pains

I walked across my living room floor, strewn with textbooks, Chuck Taylors, Sun Chips, and a dizzying mix of settling hormones and Smith’s songs. My thoughts? Maybe I should have had more children. Earlier, teenagers had filled the house. Laughing, eating, joking about school, comparing stories about classes and teachers, and exuding the powerful force of rawness and youth.

I floated on the periphery, in the kitchen on a rare evening off, cooking some meals for the week so the leftovers wouldn’t go bad. I soaked up their energy. I worked five feet away, yet they seemed unaware I could hear them.

 At times, I wandered in to add my two cents to the conversation and was treated respectfully. I retreated each time, mindful of my daughter, her embarrassment level (she tolerates me remarkably well) and not wanting to dominate the conversation.

I don’t really wish I’d had more children. For one, I didn’t have the time, energy, and most certainly not the resources for more children. I loved having one child to which I could wholly dedicate myself. I think that being an only child has been a unique gift to my daughter. She is self-reliant, she is mature and communicative; she is able to live in her own head with some degree of comfort. She thinks that squabbling and bickering is stupid and she communicates intelligently with adults. She is pleasant, polite, with lots of friends and doesn’t fit in at all with the stereotype of some weird kid who doesn’t know how to get along in the world.

This summer, I declared myself the luckiest mother on Earth. I took my daughter on vacation. We didn’t go on a cruise, visit an exotic location, or dine in fancy restaurants. We hopped in the car to see what there was to see. For five days. We ate at Chicken Annie’s in Pittsburg, Kansas and saw a lot of really big stuff (roadside attraction-wise) everywhere else. The theme of the trip became clear to me in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. We fell in love with the town, and shopped Sunday morning before heading to our next destination. We spied a cute dress in the window of a shop downtown, and entered.

The owner ate her lunch while we browsed, the only customers in the shop. I pulled dress after dress after dress for my daughter to try on. As she used the fitting room, the shopkeeper and I chatted. We talked, specifically, of the complicated relationship between mother and daughter. She’d had many mothers bring their daughters in to shop. Although she had never had children, she loved watching those mothers buy things for their young, beautiful daughters. The mothers knew it was not their time, but their daughter’s. I realized at that moment, she was correct. It was my daughter’s time. Her time to be young and beautiful and YOUNG and BEAUTIFUL. I love the age I am, and recognize the beauty that comes with each year, but the bloom of a sixteen-year-old only comes once. As I paid for my purchases, the owner gave me a bracelet from her display. She said, “I see so many mothers that come in to treat their daughters, you need something to treat yourself.” I wear that bracelet proudly, now, to remind me of that trip, my daughter’s emergence as an adult, and the wise words of strangers.

I love my baby and I have no regrets about not having more children, although the time clock is ticking its way to the end. I have twinges now and then, fair enough. It’s why I have a 10-pound dog to baby. I dread the empty nest. I told my daughter that she can live with me forever and ever, but the reception to that suggestion has been cool. Apparently, she would like to go off, be an adult, and create a life of her own. Whatever.

I’m just not ready for it to end, and the end is near. The end of this phase, at least. We are touring colleges and making plans. Plans for her to grow up and leave. When she was an infant, this time was so far away.

She is a bright, shining light in my life and I can’t imagine waking up each morning knowing that putting my arms around her is something that can’t happen today because she is hundreds of miles away.

The natural order of things dictates that children grow up and go out on their own. My philosophy as a parent, from the beginning, was that I was not raising a child, but a future adult. I wanted to give her the tools to be happy and successful for the bulk of her lifetime, adulthood, not just the skills to make it through second grade. I hope that we will pass the litmus test.

Regardless, it is her time, not mine. I had the time of laughter and light in my parent’s living room, unaware of all the happiness and weight adulthood would bring me.

I bet I miss picking up those shoes, but I can’t wait to see what the next phase brings.