My beloved daughter is 18 years old and about to graduate high school.
It was only yesterday (such a cliché, but never more true) that she was placed into my arms. The first time I saw her, she was scowling, wailing, and clearly as traumatized from the beautiful, gory, painful, frightening birth that we'd both just experienced. As the doctors visibly relaxed after the crisis had passed, my beloved friend Susan wept tears of joy and astonishment at what she'd witnessed, and Libby scurried around making sure that Ryan was okay, and Ryan sat there slightly stunned (destined to be her father, for which I am forever grateful, although I do wonder how I was ever his wife)...
The quivering, soft, warm, noisy, mess that was Tessa was placed in my arms, and I saw her face, and I held her to my naked chest, and she quieted, and I felt the unconditional love that I'd been told about but never experienced, either as a giver or a receiver. I knew, without question, in an ancient and primal way, that she was mine, and I was hers. We looked at each other, her eyes hazy, mine never more clear, and I was sure that this girl deserved to be love like nobody before had ever been loved, and that my care for her was infinite and extraordinary.
It's all so trite to say it. It sounds like some kind of gushing Mother's Day card, or wishful thinking, or some hallucination (from the painkillers I didn't take).
But it is the truest thing that I have ever known.
When Tessa was two and half, her petite body tinier than her friends', her hair a wisp of golden curls and waves, her blue gray eyes as big as her face, the stork's kiss birthmark on her forehead a mark of recognition, perhaps really an angel's kiss; at this age, tender and tiny and just becoming herself, tantrums and sticky smiles and gentle hugs and a deep love of ponies and horses and unicorns, I was diagnosed with cancer, and I ended her innocence in my stumbling words to explain it to her. She learned about the hospital - hopspittle, she said, and I was simultaneously charmed by her mispronunciation and horrified that words like "hospital" and "chemotherapy" were the realities of her childhood. We read "Sammy's Mommy Has Cancer" every single night, at her request, and her tiny fingers traced the pictures, pointing at the IV lines and showing me how the medicine traveled from the bag down into the mother. The cancer happened to my body, but it happened to US. She whispered me reassurances ("your hair will grow back, Mama" and "you're still pretty, Mama" and "one day the cancer will go away, Mama") and I didn't know if she was reassuring me, or herself, but I clung to her words as proof that she would be okay, that she had some internal resilience and strength that was otherworldly for such a tiny body to possess, and that I must find it in myself to be okay for her.
Diagnosed in June, by August my hair was falling out, and the day came when shaving it seemed better than watching it fall out in clumps. The deed done, tears shed, I gathered my wits and asked my serious, sad little girl what she wanted to do that day. Her answer was instantaneous: she wanted to go to the outdoor pool to go swimming.
My hesitation was real - with one breast, the scar still red and angry, and a bald head, the last thing I wanted to do was to don a swimsuit and head into public. But my hesitation was brief, because my love for my daughter was bigger than my fear, and if she had to talk about hopspittles all the time and deal with waves of fatigue that kept us at home and massive doses of steroids that made me short tempered, well, the least I could do was take her swimming on a hot, sunny August day.
The children at the pool stared. One of them pointed and gasped. The adults looked at me with sad eyes, clearer than the children about what was wrong with my body and why. I heard the whispers, saw the parents chiding their children to shush and not be rude. I plastered a smile on my face, jumped in the pool, turned to face Tessa at the edge, held out my arms, and yelled "jump!" and watched her face light up with glee as she hurled herself, fearless, into the water and my arms. The sun shone down, my daughter beamed, and we were the only people on the planet, and I thought that my love for her might actually make me invincible. Her presence called out bravery that I didn't know I had.
I'm pretty sure that Tessa is the reason I survived my cancer, and the treatment horrors, and the never ending years of it. Without her face - sometimes somber, sometimes laughing, but always watching me, I think it would have been too much, and I would have sunk into it. Nobody would have blamed me. But with Tessa watching, I did every bit of treatment, demanded more, and pushed far past my fatigue and pain and fear and side effects too gruesome to list here, and said, "More." I got lucky, there is no question of that - but mixed with that was a stubborn insistence that I needed to be there for my girl.
I sometimes wonder if my bond with Tessa is like the ones that other mothers have with their children. Perhaps I am a narcissistic ass to believe that my love for her is more fierce, more wild, more deep, more true. Perhaps this is the gift given to every mother, but I'm not so sure.
Tessa saved my life, and my gratitude for this is all consuming. But even if it wasn't for that, she has defined my life for 18 years, and her presence has guided me to be a better person than I would have been without her. I never would have had the courage to leave my marriage unless I was sure that the model of a relationship we were giving her was worse than divorce; for myself I might have lived with the sorrow and anger, but for her, I chose something better for all three of us.
One day about a year after the divorce, I came home from my not-right-but-it-paid-the-bills,mostly job, weary, and coached Tessa's homework at the kitchen table while I cooked, still in my heels-and-dress combo. Out of nowhere, Tessa stopped, looked at me, and said, "Mama, you're amazing...." and proceeded to let me know in her own words, out of the blue, that she saw me, really saw me, and that she saw the work and the love and the fatigue of reinvention and the fear of the unknown and the bravery that made me try anyway and most of all the love for her - and I wept as I hugged her and thanked her. I don't think any person has ever seen me so thoroughly in my whole life, before or since, and made me feel so whole and hopeful.
We live alone, just the two of us and our funny, large, playful, boisterous oaf of a dog. We've quarantined a year together, me complaining about her refusal to get out of bed on time for school; her complaining about how loud I am when teaching or talking on the phone. We've watched movies, avoided one another, cooked, baked, made jewelry, paddle boarded, picnicked. We've traded funny memes from social media. But even more, I think we've soaked up each other. In a year where she should have been leaving - to go to work, to go to school, to go out with friends, to go on dates - she was at home with me instead, in a large house that started to feel too small when it was our only world. We're probably a little dysfunctional: we know each others' preferences like an old married couple, and we take care of each other, and we complain constantly about the quirks and inconveniences (I want her to fill up the water pitcher in the fridge more often; she wants me to do a better job rinsing dishes before they go in the dishwasher).
I see her watching me still. There were years when she told me that everything I did was wrong, that I said it wrong, that I looked wrong, that I showed up in the world... wrong. My heart broke - what had happened? - and older women told me to stay the course, that this was part of it, that she'd come back. She did. It hasn't always been smooth. Some days I'm so confused - who is she, is this who she is, wait why doesn't she like me...and I don't like what she's doing either, come to think of it! - and there were a couple rocky years ago that came on suddenly, made my stomach hurt, and then mysteriously went away as if they'd never happened, and suddenly we were back as we were, meant to be together.
The 18 year old Tessa is exactly, and nothing, as I'd imagined her to be.
She is so much braver than I was at her age, and so much more sure of who she is. She is a master at friendship: she brings the most lovely people into her life, and into mine, and I'm blown away by the depth of these friendships, and by the drama free way in which she has navigated her high school years socially. Her knack for seeing people as they really are, their gifts and their flaws, is uncanny, and what's even more extraordinary to me is that she isn't judgmental about their flaws, but at the same time, she knows who is a good fit for her life and who brings drama she'd prefer to avoid. Her friends are from every race, shape, gender, sexuality, and socio-economic background. She is socially aware, and though I pride myself (maybe too much - something I need to be aware of) and quick to march for social justice, to stand up against bullies, to protect, to listen, to be self aware and to stand firm on issues of race, gender, sexuality, immigration, and more. She is deeply compassionate, but her standing for these things comes from something bigger than compassion, it comes from understanding that these "others" are whole, that they are fully formed, beautiful, deserving, and that they don't need another white girl preaching at them how woke she is. She will, without one bit of doubt, make the world a better place. She draws people to her - she's not "popular" in the high school sense, she is just thoroughly herself, and she has friends who love her as she loves them, and she makes friendships with ease. These gifts will serve her for the rest of her life, and watching her in the world, I am so proud of her.
She is fastidious about some things, a slob about others. She loves to read and has stacks by her bed, but she too often falls into the phone-hole and forgets to read. She sleeps in until I start to wonder if this time she died - who can stay in bed until 3pm?!
She hates school. Though it has been true for years, her loathing of the academic system and the way she is told to learn is confusing to me, troubling, but I've come to terms with it as best I can. Maybe one day she'll change her mind, or maybe she won't. Until then, I'm waiting to see the path she chooses, and hope that a semester at community college with three classes instead of seven, on a schedule she chooses, will help her to fall in love with learning.
But she and I have found an easy banter. After 18 years of shared jokes, shared space, shared experiences, shared trauma (cancer then divorce was not in my life's plans, but there it is), we have found our way to each other.
Tessa is my favorite person on the earth, and I admire her. I stare at her beauty in wonderment: how can this lovely, ethereal yet sturdy, loud yet contemplative, young woman be my child? How is it that she is so ready to run out the door, not to the house down the street to play on the swingset, but instead to people, places, and homes where I have never been? To a home of her own, a future of her own making, where I am a side character and not in the middle?
The feelings that I had the day I first held her have only magnified. Through it all, I've grown to love her a little more each day, become yet more amazed that she is so whole, fully formed, and herself, and yet she came from me.
The next years will be painful and wonderful, and I guess that's all how it's supposed to be. She once lived inside me, where I shielded her from the world, nourished her, and whispered my love to her with every heartbeat. I have held her tiny body in my arms, protecting her smallness, reveling in her strength. I have watched her go into the world - from playdates, to school, to sleepovers, to jumping in cars with friends and driving away with a casual wave - and soon she will depart from me, leaving the sanctuary of the room down the hall from me where I can hear if she's coughing or ill, where I rap on the door "c'mon, you HAVE to get up or you'll be late!" and thousands of dinners at the little table for two in the kitchen (in equal amounts "oh this is good" and "do I have to eat this?"). There will be days (okay) or weeks (ouch) or months (unbearable) where we don't speak, instead of checking in with our plans via text all day, and shared meals at night, and weekend adventures and splitting the chores and collapsing on the twin sofas in the family room to watch a movie.
Right now, she's downstairs with a boy she likes, home from their date exploring the I.D., boba tea and Thai food in takeout containers, watching a movie together.; they brought me dinner too (a kindness). Every now and then I hear the wave of their voices in laughter or conversation, a murmuring like the ocean, no distinguishable words, just a soothing sound of contentment. I wonder if she will figure out how to fall in love and stay there before I will, and I'm half appalled and half excited by this idea. If I have to choose which one of us gets to fall in love, and it can't be both of us, I choose her. I think, despite all of my mistakes, she might get it right. But if she read this (and I will ask her to, and she will) she would smile and say, "You'll find him, Mom." She has faith in me when I lose faith in myself; in this way, we are the same, because she fears a future that feels filled with unknowns, and I am certain that she will find her way.
My daughter is an adult, wrapping up the final rituals of childhood: the prom dress is on order, the graduation gown is unfolded and hanging in the closet; graduation party invitations have been sent, and received. I'm equally thrilled and scared to witness her transform from child to woman. Her body is lithe and strong, her belly flat, her hair silky and thick, her face lovely. Her mind is sharp when she wants it to be. She is, in so many ways, beyond me.
And yet, she is mine, and I am hers, and I still have things to teach her, and things to learn from her.
When she was small, for many years I sent her to sleep each night with the words, "Of all the girls, in all the world, you belong to me, and I belong to you, and we belong together. I love you so much; thank you for being my daughter."
I don't know how I got so lucky. I'd live this strange, twisty, sometimes unhappy life of mine a thousand times over if it meant I got to be her mom every time. Letting go, and letting her find her way without me, makes me gasp - can I do it? But I will, because she deserves a mom who doesn't cling, and because she deserves to fly, and because I've been watching her grow her wings, and I won't be the one to clip them. I trust that she will keep coming back to me, looping over me like an eagle, riding the currents for the sheer joy of it, but coming down to alight and visit with me before she flies off to the next adventure. I believe that she feels our connection as deeply as I do.
Tessa is the thing that I am most sure of, even when I'm not sure at all. She is good, and true, and right, and she will soar to higher heights than I did, just as I have flown past where my mother could take me.
I'm so grateful that I get to be her mother, for now and for always, even when it's hard, even when she's turning into a woman whose job it is to leave me. She will be gone, but we will still be connected, and somehow, I know it's all going to be okay, and sometimes it will even be amazing.
Tessa Katherine, I love you. It's your turn to fly. Don't mind me as I tear up here on the ground; I've got some dust on my wings, and I might not be able to keep pace with you, but I've got some plans of my own for flying, and we're going to be okay. Better than okay: my love will hold you up when you feel too tired to go on, and the strength that you've given me will never leave me, either.
What a strange, marvelous time in the life of a mother and daughter. I can hardly bear it.
Thank you for being my daughter.
