Daughter-Mother Time
Stalking the endangered mother daughter realtionship...
I’m at an all-inclusive resort with my teenage daughter.
Nostalgia, grief, awe—all included.
I have spent the last three months watching this young woman, like an endangered animal from a nature documentary.
Only she is not in danger, of course.
She is simply moving out. Moving on. Graduating.
Normal stuff. An annual species migration.
And I am over here just trying not to “get weird” as the kids say.
But mercy it’s hard.
Sun, a lounge chair, books…and her mom is what she picked for her week between classes ending and graduation.
I joke that she just likes to have me around to pay the bills.
But the joke is a sleight of hand.
Because she does like to have me around—and I do not take that for granted.
She is not like I was at 18.
She was invited to beach weeks and other dubiously planned adventures. She seemed to have no conflict turning it all down. I never would have said no at her age. Also I would have thought I wanted to go. The good girl’s guide to win at high school that I generally followed had promised to land me in a life that looked as close to a John Hughes movie as possible. There are rarely adults around in those movies, right?
But my daughter and I are pretty different.
I spent my young adulthood convinced I was an absolute extrovert. I certainly can be. But a decade of therapy later I better understand that that I just felt safer in the middle of the throng.
My daughter (and most of the rest of my family actually) are introverts. My soon to be graduate loves books more than all other things. While that might sound like a humble brag, I know how seductive imagination can be and how books (and tv, and devices, and work) can help you to hide from other parts life.
She is much more like my mother, actually.
My favorite line in my mother’s obituary was, “she read every non fiction book in the town library.” She was a three books a weeker. She spent a lot of time alone. Reupholstering furniture, stripping floors, sewing and hanging her own curtains and always had at least three needlepoint samplers going at any one time.
My mother did not love gatherings, unless you count daily mass.
Cocktail parties were not really her scene.
She loved her fellow volunteers at the Saint Vincent de Paul charity shop where she spent Tuesday and Thursday afternoons.
And she loved me. And I loved her.
As I type quietly so as not to wake my sleeping daughter sleeping next to me, my whole body misses my mother.
Time has folded across itself and I am now somehow both the mother and daughter.
This daughter would never have spent her senior week with her mother. It never occurred to me. Instead, I wound my way through Connecticut and NYC (boarding school grad parties are a road trip) staying up too late making memories and mistakes that I still look back on with longing.
But I my longing for my mother is so much more.
I long to tell her that I get it now. That I believe her compliments that felt like fake cheer at the time—I admire you, I’m proud of you, you’re brilliant. Sincerity has met me decades later as I say the same things to my astounding daughter. How I explode with pride and gratitude that I get to know my daughter and all I want to do is call my mother and say:
I get it now.
I’m sorry. Forgive me. I forgive you. I miss you.
I miss you. I miss you.
And in the heavy in and out of my daughter’s breathing I am stilled by the profound gift of being the daughter and the mother…
And if we are lucky enough my daughter will lay next to her daughter one day in the bittersweet missing, missing, missing of me.
Meghan Riordan Jarvis is a psychotherapist, author, and grief expert who has spent twenty years doing the thing most people won't — telling the absolute truth about loss. She is the author of End of the Hour and Can Anyone Tell Me?, host of Grief is My Side Hustle, creator of the Grief M.E.N.T.O.R Method®, and founder of the Grieftastic Book Fair. She believes grief is not a problem to solve. It is a life to rebuild.