“yearning”
This morning we drove our youngest daughter to SFO to board a flight with fellow schoolmates headed for an eight-day stay in Japan.
Driving my SUV along the freeway to the airport, my husband in the passenger seat beside me, and our youngest in the back with her suitcase I was already feeling the loss of her presence. Imagining the days to come absent of her astute witticisms and witty aphorisms, never mind the daily and drama-filled stories of school day occurrence and curious and thought-provoking encounters involving her eclectic group of friends left my mouth dry and yearning.
Unlike our two elder daughters, our youngest reflects the essential vulnerabilities binding all five of us as a family of evolving personalities and souls, both as individuals and the family as a whole.
Herein lies the very strength of our youngest and … if the saying is true, “We are only as strong as our weakest link,” ours too.
My mother once said to me, “It will be good for us to be apart.” I believe she spoke these words in anticipation of my going away to college. “We’ve been so close,” she ended her statement.
Awestruck and shocked, I absorbed her words. I did not feel close to my mother at the time.
The years of abuse, physical, verbal and emotional, that she perpetrated and launched upon me had cut an impasse that her declaration would not heal, but would instead widen.
How could she say such?
Did she not remember the past actions she committed?
Like the person who does not recognized how angrily and loudly she or he is speaking, my mother did not see her actions as abusive or excessively punitive.
Nor did she think her words harsh, but instead truthful and instructive.
And they were. I am speaking of the latter.
And yet they educated me in a way that she had not intended.
During dinner at a restaurant we frequent, I suggested that we order a “Shirley Temple,” that our youngest daughter so enjoys and let it hold a space for her.
“I miss her too,” said our middle daughter, adding, “When we reached our table I looked around thinking we’re missing one person. Then I remembered … ”
How many times did my mother look back for me, I wonder, in the months following my leaving for college?
By the time I married fours later, she had been a widow for but six years and the mother of only one four and a half.
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