On Daughters and Letting Go

When you were very little, I used to have to wait until Saturday morning cartoons were on to clean your room and to get rid of things that you had collected over the course of weeks. This was especially true around the time of your birthday or Christmas when you would get many new things and we didn’t have room for the tired or broken toys and the things you had outgrown or become disinterested in. However, it also applied to sticks and rocks you had found, leaves, feathers, colored strips of paper, random pieces of puzzles we no longer owned. You always hated to give or throw anything away.

I had tried to do this job with you, telling you about children who had nothing, and who would really appreciate the things you didn’t play with anymore, or things you had never played with because they didn’t hold interest for you. But though you liked the idea of giving something to another child that would bring them joy, the actual act of giving away things that belonged to you was not something you were able to do.

Luckily, for many reasons, this desire to hold onto personal belongings didn’t come from a place of not having enough. Somehow, all your life, we both managed to have enough. And it didn’t come from a place of not wanting to share. You were always very generous with your self, your time, your love, your ideas, your comic sensibilities, your theatrical appeal, your words and pictures and anything of you that you could share with others.

But something about letting go of, or giving away something that “belonged to you” really hurt you deeply inside, and it still hurts you today.

So, while you watched cartoons, I would clean your room. I would pick out things that you hadn’t played with for weeks or longer, things that were broken, stuffed toys that hadn’t slept with you in a very long time, and things that never seemed to inspire your creativity enough for you to bring them down and give them character. Placing these things in dark plastic bags, it felt like I was an executioner in some ways. I was choosing the things that no longer made the cut. Some things I thought were marvelous, but you didn’t. Some things held memories of you because they had once been among your favorite toys. So putting them away was bitter sweet. After the deed was done, I took the bags to the basement, a place you were not allowed to go.

When cartoons were over, you would marvel at how clean and organized your room was. You thanked me and seemed to want to spend more time there now that you knew what you had and it was a pleasant environment. Very rarely did you miss anything I removed from your room. I kept the bags for six months and if you didn’t mention any of the items, they were given to other children who loved them, I’m sure.

Now you are going through your belongings and making hard decisions. You are deciding to change your life, to move into adulthood, and you need more mobility and fewer “things”. As you decide what to keep and what to part with, you are struggling against that same pain that made you want to keep every book, every toy, and every piece of clothing you had ever owned. But you are almost an adult now, and pragmatism has taken over a bit more, so you can do this on your own.

But the pain of letting things go that are “of you” has been transferred to me now.

I’ve had a lot of practice letting people go. I suppose the first person I remember letting go of was a favorite 2nd grade teacher who left us half way through the year to have her baby and to be a stay at home mom. I remember her in stark relief. She had black hair, and freckles. I remember thinking that was a strange combination. I had blonde hair that was trying to turn red. My freckles seemed to come with the hair, even though I wished them away nearly every day. My teacher used blush to pink her cheeks. She was very fair skinned and her red cheeks stood out. She was tall and slender. She was kind, warm, and she liked me. This really surprised me. My first grade teacher, my first teacher (we didn’t have kindergarten back then) clearly, openly disliked me. I never understood why. I couldn’t make her happy. This new teacher, I could never make unhappy. I remember the day she told us she was leaving. It was the day before she would never return again. I don’t remember if I cried or not. I just remember feeling this crushed, empty place of personal hurt and the sense that nothing would ever be the same again. Mrs. Rathburn was replaced the following day by a very nice woman who I don’t remember much about at all.

I know I told you about having a substitute music teacher in the third grade who played the guitar. I had never watched anyone play guitar before. He played and sang a song that he had written and I was amazed. I raised my hand and asked if he had put that song on the radio. He laughed and said that just yesterday he had done that. He picked up the sheet music he had been reading from. He said, “I was at home and I took my song and put it right on the radio.” He put the pages he was holding on the chair next to him to show us his joke.

I decided I wanted to learn to play the guitar, too. So after class, I offered to help him stack chairs. I asked him if he would be my teacher. He said he didn’t teach guitar anymore. I told him I would pay him, though I knew I couldn’t. He asked if I even owned a guitar. I told him I didn’t. I hadn’t thought about that detail. I told him I could play his if he would let me. I bugged him until he must have thought I would never begin my walk home from school if he didn’t agree. Finally, he said that I could borrow one of his guitars and we would give it a try. But he let me know that if he saw that I wasn’t practicing, he wasn’t going to waste his time or mine by continuing.

I remember practicing while my mom cleaned the house. “Beautiful, beautiful brown eyes, smiling right into my heart. But now where are my beautiful brown eyes? Why must we be so far apart?” My mother would say, “Play that again” over and over as though it were her favorite four lines of music in the world. He told me he was pleased with my progress. Once, a boy with an electric guitar came in for a lesson after me. He was older than me and didn’t seem to want to be there. I was SO proud when the teacher said to the boy, in front of me, that if he would practice as much as I practiced, he would be a good guitar player some day!

One day I came home from playing outside. My mother told me that Mr. Hargrove had called to say that he was moving. He was coming by to pick up the guitar. He was coming that day. I was crushed. I hadn’t realized that I loved him, and I loved the guitar he had lent to me. And I loved the attention he gave me when I had my lesson. And I loved who I felt like I was when I was with him. And I loved listening to him play the piece the way I was supposed to eventually be able to make it sound. And I was losing all of those things and that person that I loved that day, with no warning.

I put on my bathing suit and I went to the neighborhood pool. From the pool you could see the cars turn onto our cul-de-sac. I jumped in the water and held myself up on the side of the pool, watching the cars turn onto our road. I didn’t know which one was his, or if I even saw him when he came to get his guitar. But I stayed until the pool closed. I didn’t want to cry in front of him. I felt silly for being so sad about losing him. And I was angry at him for taking that stupid job somewhere else and leaving me. But mostly, I was just broken hearted. So, I made sure that it was as late as possible before I went home.

When I got home, the guitar was gone. My mother said that he told her to tell me . . . something. I don’t know what his message was for me. I was hurting too badly to hear her words. I cried myself to sleep that night and felt the pain of loss for a long time.

It hadn’t healed completely when we moved to Florida the summer before my 4th grade. I lost everything that summer. I gained things, too. But I could only see what I had lost.

At 15, I stood by my grandmother as she took her last breath. She was in the hospital across from my high school. I had asked God to let me be with her when she died. I was granted that wish. When I realized she wasn’t going to take her next inhalation, I felt a panic rise inside me. I looked at my mother, and my aunt, and Nelbeth who stood there, seemingly not comprehending what was happening. Frantically, I said, “GO GET THE NURSE!”

“No,” My mother said. “Wait.” I realized then that they were waiting until she was really gone, until there was nothing to revive. I felt her spirit in the room. I knew she was looking down at me holding her hand, at her two daughters and her niece who were watching, waiting, and feeling a loss of their own. She had been battling with cancer for months, and I knew she was dying. But being there at the end, when she took her last breath was not what I expected. I felt a panic deep inside that I was never going to see life in her eyes again, that someone who had loved me had left the universe that I was in, had left me. Again.

By the time my father died when I was 19, I had experienced a different kind of loss. I believed that my future was going to be with John Ottolini. He was my first love, and all I would ever need. I envisioned us having Sunday dinner with his parents, raising our little Italian babies right there in Ormond Beach, Florida, never wanting for anything more.

No matter if you leave the person and the relationship that you love, or you are the one being left ~ it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change the sense of loss. Lost dreams, lost comfort, lost love. Lost kisses and caresses and hopes in the future. Lost idealism. Lost trust. And the fear that your life will never be the same, or worse, that it will never be as good as the life you are walking away from. A part of you wants to hold tight to that person, that love, those dreams that could never be ~ to become complacent and accept it for what it is and to try to make it be enough. But usually by the time you are leaving, you have already tried that. And it doesn’t work. You can’t settle for what you have if your soul is saying you need something that this relationship doesn’t provide.

When my daddy died, I cried myself to sleep in the arms of Dean. I would awaken crying because dad visited me in my dreams. In those wonderful, horrible dreams, we both knew that he was really dead, and that we only had this dream time together. Then he would be dead again. And every time I awakened from those dreams of him, talking about the things we missed, the things he wished he had done differently, the gladness we had for the times we shared when he was in this world, when I woke up it felt just as if he had died another death and the pain was new for me again.

Eventually I felt the loss of Dean. I felt no one would ever love me like Dean had loved me, and that perhaps I wanted too much and should be able to accept what I have, who I have. Then I met your dad and I knew why OJ and Dean (and a few others) had never been right.

But I had to endure devastating loss with Jobie as well. I thought those wounds would never heal. And many of them never will. But with each great love and loss, I have learned and grown. I have carried the spirits of family members who died tragically so that they could help others to heal and to grieve. I have learned that the people who I have allowed myself to love fully have blessed my soul, and that a piece of them lives with me still.

I have experienced no greater love than the love I have enjoyed with you. This relationship wasn’t one we could try on to see if it fit and then decide not to see each other if it didn’t. This relationship was meant to be from the very beginning. I didn’t have to learn to love you, or you me. We loved each other primally, from conception. From the moment I was aware of you, I had to make decisions. From the moment I made the decision to bring you into this world and to be your mother, my love for you grew into something so strong that the loss of you might have killed me. And when you were born, you had that love for me. It grew with each day, and days turned into years, and then came the days when you needed to break up with me.

I had told myself that since you and I were so very close, that we wouldn’t really need to go through that breaking up stage. I have come to understand that the closer you are to your daughter, the harder she has to break up with you.

So, you are going through your things to sort out what to leave in your childhood and what to take with you to adulthood. I have spent years trying to prepare you to be a strong, smart, independent young woman who has the capacity to love completely and who knows that she can rely on herself to create the life she was meant for ~ and to love her community and make a family along the way. So I must have known that somewhere down the road we would reach this place. You are here, and I am not.

As hard as it has always been for you to part with acorns and play-doh fairies and little scraps of paper, it is also hard for me to part with the soul I have loved and nurtured from infancy. It is the biggest pain I will endure, surely. Because a greater pain I could not endure. I am feeling so much loss ~ mixed with so much pride. I guess I had hoped that we could become close friends and we wouldn’t ever have to be apart.

Last week I was talking to some parents in Asheville about this. Craig has a two year old. He can’t imagine parting from her. He wants her to stay 2 so he doesn’t ever have to do this part that we are doing. But he thought about his own relationship with his parents. He said, “It’s nice when you can become friends with your parents.” He thought about the analogy of “breaking up”. He said, “So, we aren’t dating anymore. But we still see each other.” And I finished. “But we’re just friends.” There was laughter among the parents and the teen in the room.

Like old lovers, we meet our children in a different place eventually, if we are lucky. We won’t ever have what we once had. I will be your first love, not your last. Maybe you can say that you learned how to love all the other people in your life because you learned how to love me first. And in the end, if we are “just friends” I will be happy to count you among the valued people in my life. My life has been so enriched by good friends, even more than it has been enriched by old lovers.

I am letting go and I will begin learning how to heal again. Unfortunately, the loss, hurt, healing stuff doesn’t get easier with practice. I feel like I did when Mrs. Rathburn left me to have her own baby.

But eventually, I hope to be able to build a different kind of relationship with you that allows you to be completely who you are, and me to be completely who I am, separate from who we represent to each other. I understand that to do that, we have to live a life apart for a time. I will so look forward to the time when you come back to me, a woman who is whole and confident, nervous and self-conscious, strong and open, wise yet loving. I will be happy to have a friendship with another woman who I can feel a closeness to that is based, not only on our history, but on who we are as individuals, as women, as people who share common bonds of many colors.

And I will love you, no matter where your path takes you.