Sunday Visit

(written October 2009)

I'm sitting in the car's passenger seat staring out the window as we wing our way to Portland, Oregon. We have driven this beautifully lush highway more times than I can count. Now with our daughter living there the scenery is becoming embedded in our memories. I have been an empty nester for a little over a year and have both the excitement and anguish of an expectant mother upon seeing her newborn child. The grass is so green I think as I stare at the meadows and farmlands. The cows and their calves gather on one field and the goats and sheep are on another. Why are these animals so separate? And why do I feel so apart from my twenty year old daughter? The teen years changed our relationship. We no longer cuddled; we hardly spoke. The hugs have returned but sometimes she stresses out when I try to “talk” with her. So I step back and shrink my words. I am gregarious and she can be reserved. Yes, we appear to be separate animals.

I want to be able to relax around my daughter; I want her to be proud of who I am. She would no doubt relate the exact same words about being around her mother. The sky is blue; the rain is holding off. I breathe in the fields and the hills, the barns and the fences; I breathe in my life. What do I want to do in my sixth decade? Mothering vanished in the blink of an eyelash and I feel bereft. How do I begin creatively dreaming again? I'm smart; I'm capable; but I've fallen down a rabbit hole filled with brown dirt rather than colorful fantasies.

A hawk waits for his dinner. A crow flies across the sky. In one enormous black wave, starlings flutter up from the fields. I keep watching and wonder at the brilliance of birds flying in formation. It never fails. Every group of birds I see starts out in a cluster but then arrange themselves into a large V. Is this for visibility and protection? The old adage: birds of a feather flock together comes to mind. Will my daughter eventually flock to her bird family? She knows we are watching out for her. Her more frequent use of the four letter L word tells me she is circling back.

Our restaurant silence contains huge levels of meaning as we sit across from each other for lunch. The daughter's smooth fair skin, deep blue eyes and long darkening auburn hair make her genuinely lovely. She chews her nails, nervously glances up and then down. She seeks my approval and I seek hers. The love is there, just underground. We've come so Dan, my husband, can share some positive news about a health scare he has gone through. We have been the protective parents and didn't want to worry the daughter until more information was secured. Gratefully, it is a good outcome. Now our daughter will be drawn into our flock of knowledge.

I leave the two of them alone at her apartment and wander the funky, fun street of Hawthorne Blvd. After window shopping I walk the fifteen blocks back. Walking takes the edge off my loneliness. I sense I'm coming to the other side of this empty nest phase. The health scare has brought me closer to Dan and closer to the meaning of my life's elder phase. The sands of time have become the rapidly gushing forth of time. I can't hold life still even while leading a slow existence.

My daughter calls my cell and wonders where I am. They have had their talk and set up her wireless network. We chat as I walk down the misty street towards her. Our conversation is relaxed, and when I enter her apartment I feel a deep letting go. It's coming, this uninhibited being with each other, this seeing beyond mother/daughter labels. My words flow and they are the right words: “Take time to play your guitar, take time for your music... for music is your soul.” Her wide eyed facial expression tells me she recognizes I understand her more than she thought I did. Nine and a half months and nineteen years of living together must count for something.

We hug; we kiss. She walks us to our car and our reciprocal “I love yous” becomes a thin thread attached to the bumper of our car, following us all the way back from her home in Portland to our home in Eugene.

© 2011