I just came back from spending four days with my nineteen-year-old daughter. We met in Arizona, a quick flight for both of us, to stay in my mother’s ‘winter house.’ At 83, my mom still travels from Chicago to Arizona every winter to beat the Chicago cold. She’s in great shape, both cognitively and physically, and I felt grateful to be sandwiched between my mother and daughter for a few days in the sun.
When I invited my daughter and her roommate to join me in Arizona for their spring break from college in Colorado, I didn’t think they’d say yes. And, even after they said yes, I was nervous. I worried that my daughter and I would fall into old patterns — I would want more, she would want less — and the trip would be a bust.
But from the beginning when I picked the girls up from the airport I was totally surprised. My daughter was light and playful and accommodating. And I, maybe because my own mother was present, was more easygoing myself. I gave my daughter lots of space (most of the time) and let her come to me. This was the fourth time I’ve seen my daughter since she went to college nine months ago — once at college, twice for vacations home, and this time in a neutral place.
The first time I visited my daughter on her campus was borderline traumatic. It was like trying to have a meaningful conversation through tinted windows in a hurricane. We simply couldn’t see or hear each other. We couldn’t connect. The two times my daughter came home from college felt a little bit like high school. I nagged. She bristled. We connected in that old familiar way, but it was not super fun or enriching the way I experienced my daughter in Arizona.
For the last week, whenever anyone asks how my week with my daughter was, I say, without hesitation, “It was great!” Everytime I think about our few days together I am awash with gratitude. “She was so nice to me,” I tell anyone who will listen, “she asked me to go running. We had long walks with deep talks. It was amazing.”
Yesterday in yoga, the teacher shared that we are in a period of emotional chaos right now because we are in the between time of two eclipses. “Now is the time,” she said, “that you might become aware of old wounds. Notice what you become aware of, how you can grow from these memories.”
Being a mother is filled with wounds. I read somewhere that 70% of parenting is repairing. We make mistake after mistake and must learn how to do things differently the next time. Mothers spend years building callouses on our souls to prepare for the next battle. The cliche is 100% true: being a parent is the hardest job in the world. The responsibility to shepherd another human through the jungles of childhood, adolescence and now young adulthood, is filled with struggles of will, philosophical conflicts, and raw emotion. But the truth is that mothers just want to love and be loved.
There is something energetic that has happened in this new space created between my daughter and me. It started when she first left and I can feel it continuing as she stays far away. She comes back in a little over a month and she’ll be home for the whole summer.
“How has it been with her being away at college?,” an old friend I see rarely, asked the other day.
“It’s been great,” I responded, surprising both myself and my friend.
And it has been great. I miss my daughter everyday. Sometimes when she’s college-level busy and we go several days without talking, I ache with worry and I long to hear her voice. I can’t wait to have her home again.
But I have to admit that I feel some trepidation about what patterns we’ll fall into when she returns. This morning my daughter sent me a video of the two of us running on our trip. It’s a clunky awkward bouncy head video with the sun shining in our eyes. Both of us are smiling wide and she is laughing. Getting that video from my daughter was like a coded message from her letting me know that she too has that loving feeling about our trip to Arizona.
I think about the energy of the universe. I like to learn those anecdotes like my yoga teacher shared in class. It comforts me to believe that there is something big and mysterious happening in the galaxies beyond that affects all of us tiny specs down here on earth.
The evolution of my relationship with my daughter over the last year feels planetary. It’s like we’re two planets orbiting each other through different cycles. We just came off a beautiful period, a gorgeous sunny time filled with love and mutual admiration. Next month when my daughter comes home from college we’ll rotate into another phase. I have no idea what it will be, but I’m excited to find out. I’m ready.