Her

I’ve been reading The Elegant Gathering of White Snows.  Who hasn’t wanted to just get up and get away from it all at some point? To just WALK… or DRIVE… or GO?

But the story has me thinking a lot, because I am every one of those women at some point in my life.

Right now I’m thinking of her, and crowns of dandelions.

When she was a little girl, I was very much the stereotypical 80’s mom.  I crafted, made my own chocolate Easter bunnies, baked, arranged flowers, sewed, and refinished furniture.  I remember once telling my sister that I found great satisfaction and meaning in having a nice house, in having things orderly and beautiful for my daughter.

We went out for lunch once a week, until the divorce, but then we’d sit in the back yard of the townhouse and make crowns of dandelions.

It pained me to work.  In the lab there was a large black and white poster of a little girl with tears in her eyes.  I was unhappy with the day care, and had to change after I found teeth marks on her arms.  Between contracts in engineering, I worked as a maid, but made less during that time than the cost of daycare.  

I went back to school, I struggled, and when she told me she wished we had a house, I bought a house.  A house that became an increasing struggle when her little brother ended up in the hospital for years on end, when I couldn’t afford the mortgage, the electric, the water, and eventually we ended up moving back into apartment after apartment. By then there were 4 kids to worry about, and I’d relied on her to help with the twins so I could work more for less, and struggle through school in hopes of some future better life for everyone.

I’d thought to remarry… a few times… and hoped that would bring increased stability to the family, but my terrible taste in men, my falling into the Beauty and the Beast scenario time and time again, made things worse.  More kids… less stability… and I’m pretty sure I lost a lot of her respect, and possibly her love, in those days.

Gone were the country cows in the kitchen.  Gone the home made flower decorations, the Princess House parties that decorated the home in what was then grand 80s and 90s style.  Gone were the flowers we’d planted, the garden she so carefully tended, and gone her youth as she went on to high school, then college, and became more and more aware of everything we didn’t have.

And inevitably we got to that point that often comes with young adult women and their mothers, when independence becomes a struggle and an act of rebellion, although she never rebelled in the way many kids did in those days, there were still the arguments and tears and the coldness that said it was time for her to make her own way.

There are times I wish I could go back to the point where she was young, to the point she was barely able to pull the yellow flowers with her little fingers, not to tell her things, but to tell myself.

To tell myself that she didn’t need a father, that I didn’t need a husband, and that all the searching could have been spent making beautiful fairy princess crowns of golden weeds.  That there were more important struggles than making things look whole, that there were things more fulfilling than having more children.  That the more we try to make our lives look like what everyone tells us they should look like, the less our lives our lived.

Two years ago I decided to go back, for myself, and while there are no dandelions, there will be the sea, my paints, and my dog.

I’m not sure any of the kids understand.

I’m pretty sure some day, no matter what their own paths are, that they will. And so I go on reading these stories about older women who finally, at the end of it all, travel.  Who walk, take airplanes, drive, and move AWAY to come NEARER to who they are.  Who escape from the expectations they embraced most of their lives, and look for who they are, aside of all that. I don’t know if I’ll ever find that kind of enlightenment.  Maybe I’m still too shackled to the “should haves” I grew up with.

If I could go back… or if I could go sideways somehow, to give my daughter one piece of advice, it would be to shuck the “shoulds” and live with the things that make her genuinely happy.

The best part, for me, is despite my bad examples, she’s found someone who loves her, cares for her, and stands by her.  I know that as she makes the choices that will shape her own life, that he’ll stay by her side.  I know that they aren’t “traditional”, but that he loves her, and that she has found at least one golden flower among the weeds in her garden.