are a way for mothers to “keep” wandering adult kids, ya know?

As is usual, I cried when I hugged her.  Couldn’t help myself, we’ve been separated for a couple of years.  She is the daughter of my heart, my first child, though I did not meet her until she was 3 years old.  She allows me to be her mother, she calls me “ma”.  She introduces me as her stepmother – though my marriage to her father lasted only a New York minute and he has long since passed away.

She is at a conference and she is managing her image.  We are in Orlando and she has been nominated as the national winner of the “Medical Practice Office Manager of the Year” award.  So we shyly ask an official for permission to skip out of the afternoon session and go shopping.  I am set that she must accompany me to pick out my outfit for the “Eighties” party that is happening on Friday night.  I tell her “Jill, the last time I was at a conference, I attended morning sessions only – people just pretend to participate.”  But she is so serious about her professional status and so I must be part of the permission asking process.  And then we go – off to the mall.  It is a perfect day.  We talk about our family and especially I wish to hear about my granddaughters.  I am also very interested in the state of her marriage.  She has been married for more than 20 years and I am anxious to hear that her marriage is intact and working still – as it should be.  She satisfies my fears and anxieties.  She is happy.  I become delighted with her easy going nature.  Something about her is different and I tell her so.  She has matured, she understands in a way that had not occurred before.  She picks out the perfect outfit for me, and just like my oldest biological daughter, she lovingly accompanies me on my trips to the dressing room, waiting out side to tell me that I am “cute”, beautiful and all of those other things.  As we drive back to the hotel our conversation inevitably returns to our history.

We speak of her anger for her biological mother and our history as a family.  I ask her “so you let me off of the hook completely” as we talk about her hurts from her childhood.  She tells me that yes, she has let me off the hook, and my guilt is assuaged somewhat by her love.  We speak of her father and she explains to me that even with his absences “I always felt loved by him.”

We finish our day, we sleep and early I hear her making phone calls and getting ready for her day.  The first thought that comes to my mind, what I must know and what I must ask “Jill, did you always feel loved by me?”  And here is the fulcrum, the cruxt of our mixed lives together, our history and our future.  She tells me, simply “yes, I always felt loved by you.”  Now I know, more than any other thing that is important to me, this is the middle of it.  Loving her, my first child, is one thing – but in the oddities that became our life story together, her knowing that I love her seems so much more important than anything else in our relationship.

I run errands, I do the normal motherly things, pick up her mascara, and exchange her shirt and then we have lunch.  Again, I marvel at how special she is.  Jill is sensitive to me and solicitous of my well being.   I get a picture of Jaxsun by text, and we both laugh out loud at how funny and cute he is with his football gear and baby bottle.  I am so happy that we share our love and our blood with the same people.

Quickly the evening comes and the Awards Dinner is here.  We take our pictures and for some ridiculous reason I am complaining that she is taller than me.  For the first picture Jill tries to stoop, which is a disaster for the picture and I realize that I am silly for being sensitive about tallness.  What swirls through my head is that I want to resist this moment, a moment when I must acknowledge that I am no longer THE parent, I am shorter than Jill and somehow it indicates a diminished status in her life – rather than what it is. We redo the pictures and Jill takes her shoes off.  As we get inside to the awards ceremony, I notice that her laces are untied and just like a mom, I tap my thigh to indicate to her to put her foot up and just like a kid she puts her shoe next to my lap and I tie her shoelace.  I am remembering her five-year-old-self standing mutantly in front of me, bottom lip out, refusing to learn to tie her shoes.  The memory makes me smile and then I have to laugh because there we are – adults – and I am acting like she is my baby again and I have to tie her shoelace.

Jill is called to the stage with the four other nominees.  I have the camera and I am very excited to be there to record this special moment for her.  There is an awkward moment as everyone’s name is called and then there is this terrible pause and I am thinking – oh my gosh – they are just leaving her there standing alone on the stage – and then it dawns on me, she WON!  I am crying again, for the dozenth time in such a short time…

I am so happy, to be here, to be part of this, to have the time to talk about what was and to learn to enjoy what is, the now of our relationship.  The next morning, we hug several times to say goodbye.  I walk away crying, as is my ritual when I must leave her. 

When my step-daughter married, I knew that she would be physically and geographically separated from me.  It was a change I could not welcome, however, it taught me many things.  For some reason, I thought that my emotions would change once my child became an adult.  They did not.  In this sense I struggled with our separation and resisted much of what must happen when one’s child gets married.  It was 22 years ago, and that struggle was in vain.  I don’t know why, but we both have a new sense of acceptance.  I delighted in her personality, vibrant, accepting, loving.  She is everything a woman could be, in love with her husband, a dedicated mother and successful in her career.  I like her philosophy about life and I love her competent management of her peers, her family and the thriving medical practice that she administers.  It was an amazing two days.  Allowing the relationship to change was phenomenal – the emotions – never changed.  All the love I have for her, and have always had for her, bubbled over, condensed into the moments that I can share with her.  Guess what?  It was all okay.  Resisting the change was useless, had no effect, except to intermittently separate me from her.  

As I left her, I cried the same tears that I always cry when I leave her, but this time, I know that it is simply part of our process.  My grief does not cause me to try to force change.

We’re too aggressive with raising our children the “right” way.  It has shades of the Victorian era when children had to be perfect lest they be banned from the presence of adults.  While we work diligently to make sure they are happy, we make sacrifices to assure their pleasure, we push valiantly to ensure their success, we may be failing at the most important task of all – and that is their mental health.  There is already research out there that indicates that children feel stressed about their parents need for them to be happy, kids are complaining that they cannot discuss upset feelings with their parents because there is an expectation that they “feel” good and “be” happy.

What I find ironic about all of this is that, children will take what they want from life experiences, not what we wish for them to have.  As I listened to my daughter-in-law talk about this yearning sense of anxiety that blossomed within her after giving birth, I reflected on my own avid feelings about child-rearing.  Decades ago I read a quote by Jacqueline Kennedy – and I am paraphrasing “I must do a good job raising the children, what else is more important? And when could you possibly get a second chance at doing a good job with your children?”  That sentiment was completely real to me.  My style of raising children is to cradle them in a safety net (which they may crawl out of) to give them as much as I can, anytime that I can (which they may reject) and to assure that they can move forward in their lives(and they may not).

In retrospect, I could have accomplished it all with a lot less anxiety.  Children are not the blank slates of nature.  Children come to us with their own DNA make-up, their own dream-like life agenda and their own decisions about what experience they will keep and what experiences they will discard.  When I sacrificed I expected some understanding of that sacrifice – still do – yet on countless occasions that sacrifice did not even register, the kids were oblivious to it.

What did register was this:  My whole hearted and complete investment in their lives.  From moment to moment I am interested in who they are, what they are about and where they are going.  I am interested because I like them and I want to be with them.  Because they are finally adults, the lingering agenda of “you must perform and you must be happy” is gone.  Thank God!

I think we miss the point when we work hard to be the perfect parent with the super achieving child.  Our children are who they are and thus as human beings deserve to be accepted with their own agenda.  That is not to say that we cannot make a safe, happy childhood for them, or conversely, as parents, we can also ruin whatever fighting chance our child may have had for happiness.  That is to say that whenever we take on a social structure such as perfect parenting, we leave out who we are.  We reject our own selves and our own genuineness.  This rejection gets carried through to our children and takes our ability to be genuine with them away.

Perfect parenting is an impossible icon anyway.  I don’t suggest we throw the baby out with the bathwater, what I do suggest is that we pay more attention to the humans that are our children and not cherish the idea that people have to be happy and perfect and super-achievers.  Perfect children are no more real than perfect parents.  Being authentic is a way of letting go that allows a much more genuine love to flourish.  Acceptance allows a sharing that is transformative for both the parent and the child.  What loving parent would reject sharing and genuine love?