This is for my daughter to who took a Lyft to the ferry – and the ferry to San Francisco and walked 15 minutes in the cold morning air to get to her job in the city today.
For the way I just wrote out the word San Francisco, instead of SF – like I have done for the past 38-years – as if this place has become, after all these years of living in the Bay Area, more significant since someone I love more than anyone – except her little sister – now resides there.
How yesterday I stood at the corner of California and Fillmore and I knew where I was. I had passed through that intersection many times, but today I was anchored by blood, felt an urgent sense of place, how I calculated from where I stood, where my daughter’s apartment was, which streets I would take to get to her. How fast I could be there in an earthquake.
For my car which is loaded with the last of her things – the mattress and all of her toiletries, the pillows and the blankets, and how I just went upstairs to see what her room looks like without her. For the white go-go boots with silver studs that she left on on the floor – the ones she had to have two summers ago, and the pale pink sheets she tossed lazily on the bed – for the way the morning light hit the sheets in such a dreamy way that I had to run up there with my camera to capture the light, as if I could capture her one more moment.
People say ‘good luck with the empty nest,’ but she left 6 years ago and I’ve said many goodbyes, driven her to Colorado and back many times, helped her move in and out of her Seattle apartments. This time she was only back for five months, and I think this lump I feel has something to do with the way I cared for her – the way she cared for me – the morning coffee, the turmeric ginger milk before bed. The way she’d say goodnight and hit the light. The sound of her feet on the stairs.
How sometimes in our five months together, in the beginning, she slept with me and how much we loved that – two grown women in a queen sized bed. We knew we shouldn’t. It must be wrong, we were too old for this, surely she belonged in her own room – the little princess and the queen – the way we told each other story slices until we fell asleep.
Last night in the kitchen she turned to me and said, “Hug?” because she knew I’d had a difficult conversation with my boyfriend, a Facetime call where he kept interrupting me, saying, “I know, I know,” and how I stopped him and said, even though you know, please give me an opportunity to finish my sentence, and he rolled his head back and closed his eyes. The call was a disaster and I walked into the kitchen to find her.
“Hug?” she said in the kitchen after the call she promised she had not heard, and I let my body fall a little more heavily into hers as she said the thing I’ve said to her many times, “Everything is alright,” she whispered. “Everything is just fine.”
Me and this grown child, and the dizzy business of living, and my schedule, that from 8-12 I teach, and from 1-2 I get to the gym, and don’t forget the post office and remember to get some fresh air, even if it’s at the bottom of my list.
And in the midst of all of this I make sure to send her off with an extra roll of toilet paper because she and her friend move in today, and they’re working girls and when they get home it will be dark. How before I headed for the bridge to get her these last things, I ran around the house thinking, “milk, she might need milk, or kitchen cloths, or an extra pillow,” and how I had to stop myself, “stop it, crazy,” I said. “Stop it.”
It was the caring for her that guts me the most. The making sure the house was warm, the coffee, a smoothie to take to work, the way she’d come downstairs and have me weigh in on her outfits and which shoes looked best with which pants. How at the end of the day, I’d stand at the bathroom door, listening to her tell me about how things went as she washed her face.
“Stay,” she’d sometimes say if she could tell I was antsy, moving onto the next thing. “Stay,” she’d say, if she saw me calculating how much time was left in the day.
For how easy it was to take a breath and to let my shoulders fall, to face her. For the way she kept asking me to stay.
Would you like to start a daily writing practice in your own home? With 27 Wilder Days, I’m bringing the Wild Writing practice to you through a series of short videos that will arrive in your inbox each day for 27 days. In each video I will share some delicious aspect of the practice that has served me for the last 25 years, as well as read you a poem and give you a jump off line to get you started.
and I am transported to 1977-
Jackson Browne is singing Stay…
the sound of her feet on the stairs, story slices, the dizzy business of living…
Bullseye.
Thank you so much Laurie
Tears in my eyes. “Stay” Sitting in Glasgow, ferry to my destination delayed for the 4th day, feeling antsy myself, wishing I was around your table and slicing up the word, “stay” and all it’s itinerary meanings. Love to you. xx
Thank you so much. Your writing always reaches and finds me. I always find myself in your writing.
Exquisite. I’m seeing a preview for myself in a few short years.
The emptiness of the empty nest, so beautifully described here, the pain of saying “goodbye” and the yearning for their return…
“Stay; I will keep you warm.”
The heart of being a mother.
Thank you xx
The honest ethereal photograph you chose speaks volumes to me. Makes my heart mourn. Your words, too. Perfect for a morning when fretting over my daughter who is beginning puberty and I’m seeing straight into the crystal ball and trying to make time stand still. I’m in bed snuggling with her now and reading this savoring the moments. Hugs to you. I do not feel so alone, now.
Wonderful essay. We never want to say goodbye and yet sometimes we must. Our babies become kids who become adults who have lives, but there is always a part of us which cherishes those memories of them as little ones. Vulnerable, affectionate and so full of love. We create children and then they recreate us.
Love love love
Gorgeous and gutting. Like being a mother. Like being alive. Your words are a blessing on this day. Thank you, dear one.
So beautiful. Takes my breath away on this dark snowy morning in Montana.
Ahhhh dear Mama …this all resonates and said so beautifully. Thx for the reminder of that ‘other side’ as I battle/struggle/love the last two teen girls still ‘in’ the nest. It’s gut wrenching this LOVE. 💗
Oh, Laurie. Absolutely perfect. Every word. Every emotion. Every way you exquisitely capture human experience and gift us with it. Thank you. 💕
So beautiful. Thank you for bringing me into your love. Thank you for sharing the possibility of what a true and trusting mother-daughter relationship can be.
I’ve come back to this to re-read it three times in the last hour and a half. Thank you for this gift of an essay.
Laurie, thank you for sharing your life with us. This is such a beautiful piece.
Always so good to read the intensity of your writing. Thank you and thank you for introducing me to Maya Stein who gooses me weekly to write better, to let my thoughts come out ten lines at a time.
E
How I miss your table. Tables were born to be full.
Your connection to yourself, to your daughter, to the light in that room- it’s the way you are there for it all and share it with us that I love so very much. This touched me so very much,
Such a sweet, powerful and poignant expression of mother daughter love. Thank you Laurie!
So beautiful Laurie!! Feeling it right along with you as I read your words. Gorgeous.
Nummy Laurie. I’ve loved watching you and your daughters grow over the years through you writing.
So pure Lorie thank you for this
I make sure to send her off with an extra roll of toilet paper …
Yes, yes, yes. And even if you think you did this 6 years ago and it hit you then you are still saying it and it still hits you — maybe it hits you differently — Thanks Laurie. I loved it.
crazy good…crazy emotional…crazy tears…you have me in tears, buddy. I could envision you and Ruby as I read this and I could visualize your kitchen space, your bedroom, the lightswitch. And, I could also envision the day Sami will be leaving me, our home, to go off to college, in not too long a time, and that just gets me…to tears. Stay…just a little longer…
I was just thinking today how well I care for my grown daughter when I get the chance. I was too busy or self-absorbed, or immature to care properly for her when she was little. I do things for her now, hoping I can make up lost points. I know in my heart the damage cannot be erased, but maybe eased?
Oh, Laurie, how lovely, how true. Although I had to say goodbye to our son, for the best and healthiest reasons, The tears I shed and more, the tears I held back are still glinting in my now-green eyes. Speaking to you from the chasm of some 30 years, the feelings remain true, as the love remains strong.
Beautiful. I read this with a little tear coveting your beautiful ability to caregive so selflessly. Thank you for sharing.
I sleep in the bed with the two of you and pick up the go go boots from the floor. I have no daughter but I am a daughter. I was a daughter. I still talk to my mother. I still stay. I hold us all.
Love this one especially Laurie. I have a son and it is so different than having a daughter. (I have a niece I’m very close to – so I feel the difference even I’m that relationship.) I just spent a little more than a week with Conner in Japan. I saw glimpses of how kind and patient he will be with me when I’m old. He was a perfect traveling companion. I love that closeness in adult children whenever we can get it after they fly the coop.
…and of top of it all you really did capture the room, the light, the tangled sheets. Like the painting by Andrew Wyeth called Groundhog Day. There’s a world in there.
Full heart and yes yes yes, as I read this. A loving valentine to all the mama/daughter relationships out there. Thank you for sharing that loving mama perspective in just the way you do, Laurie.
(And as always, leaves me wishing to pull up a chair at your wild writing table!)
I hope my mum felt just a tiny bit of the love for me that you feel for your girls Laurie. Your writing gives me the hope that it just may have been possible when I left home for the first time so many moons ago. Thank you for your courage to write so tenderly.
I live through your words having never had either experience of Mother or Daughter. I am transported to a wonderful place. Thanks Laurie.