ON DAUGHTERS GROWING UP

My daughters are 26 and 28.  I love them beyond measure.  And I love knowing them as adults and seeing what they are making of their lives.  Giving them life and starting them on their paths is the best thing  I have ever done. 

Here’s the rub, though – the thing I want to write about now, the thing nothing prepared me for:  I did not know how much I would miss their younger selves.  Of course, I knew they would grow up.  I just couldn't anticipate what it would feel like to lose forever the babies, the toddlers, the little girls that they had been.   

A couple of months ago I was walking through a park on a weekday.  The park was filled with young mothers and their children.  I sat down for a few minutes and watched them.  They wore their youth so lightly.  They would live in this world of young motherhood forever.  (You can’t see the end of it when you are in the middle.)  I envied them that tunnel vision, that feeling that this is your life—days filled with children, with you, the mom (and the other parent, of course) at the center, loving, caring for, feeling both amazed and exhausted by, your children.   

And, then, it is over. 

Slowly, at first, as they reach puberty and begin the turn outward, and then – following a rush of senior-year activities – they are gone.  They leave home to go to college or whatever the next step is for them.  They come home.  But by the time  they finish college (if all goes as it ought) they don’t live with you anymore. 

Don’t get me wrong.  I don’t live my life in a state of mourning.  I don’t think about this all of the time.  But, sometimes I see a young woman with two little girls and my heart cracks a bit, thinking of my little girls.   Where have they gone?  They have turned into amazing young women.  But where are those babies, those toddlers, those little girls? 

It is different for our children.  They have always known us as adults.  Granted, we get older, but we are essentially the same people they have always known, only older and creakier.  Sadly, they don’t remember the baby-and-toddler years when we were the center of their universe, nor do they remember much about the little-girl years.  Their memories likely begin with the years when it became important to separate from us.  

But we remember it all.  I think that is probably why parents of adult children drive their kids nuts with stories about their childhoods.  They want to relive those moments that their children have forgotten.

Today, my oldest and her boyfriend got on a plane back to London, where they live, so I am feeling the sadness of that distance as well.

I am so grateful for Skype.  And for the photos of my daughters in all of their growing up incarnations—I will try not to foist these on them too often. 

Most of all, I am grateful for the experience of being a mom, with all of its bittersweetness.  I would not trade it for anything.