It wasn’t only that I didn’t know who she was anymore; I didn’t know who I was as a parent either. What happened to being the cool mom who understood the independent teenage spirit?
Thanks to you, I'm afraid of hemorrhoids, unpasteurized goat cheese, coffee, sleeping on my back, doing Zumba, and eating any kind of sliced lunch meat (actually the latter is probably a blessing). Fear has become my constant companion, whispering savage things (not suitable for your undeveloped ears yet) about all that could go wrong. Get used to it, your Grandma says. Welcome to parenthood.
The shit about getting older is not that you get tired at four in the afternoon, or that your face starts to look like it’s melting, or that you can’t remember what you knew five minutes ago, or that you work out five days a week just to look like the very worst version you imagined yourself at when you were twenty five, or the eyes that you used to be able to thread a needle in the dark with, now need reading glasses to see your own face in the mirror. Or when you check out a cute random guy you realize you’re about twenty five years older than that person and you are now that old perv, or… I could go on and on but you get the point.
I have become completely convinced that I am destined, in any arena where I judge others, to become those others. A karmic way of reminding me that my tendency toward judgment is really just a trick of perspective. And so this week I have become my adoptive parents. Watching my child marry and reproduce long before I am ready to accept it is even a possibility.
Do you ever get a break, I wonder, from how fiercely you love them? I'm just curious... how are you supposed to let them leave home, lose jobs, get their hearts trampled on? I know everyone does it, everyone survives it. But sometimes it just seems so unlikely, unless I can just get a little respite from this horrible hot love that hits me behind the knees. Motherhood can be such a mindfuck.
