The picture of the relaxed-looking daughter above who seems in charge of her life as she surveys prospective wedding venues in Ashville, North Carolina is actually an illusion created by my Nikon 3100 SLR camera.
She is 24 now, an independent curmudgeon who never appreciated a thing I did. She is also funny, devoted to me, and wild. As a kid, she drowned her pagers; she smoked and drank; she told me she was going to be a food scientist at the age of 5, pulling out every sauce and meat and mustard concoction from the refrigerator, adding soy sauce to strawberries or mixing cheese with maple syrup. In virtually every respect she did exactly what she wanted because she knew what she wanted.
At 14 she started catering at old folks homes. She read to Alzheimer's patients. She made a lot of friends with women and men I would have classified in another age and time as "low class" or even "trashy." Frequently they would cuss at me when I'd try to find out where she had disappeared, which was often. At one point, at the age of 16, she clocked me and gave me a bloody nose. All her girlfriends, Grainne excepted, got pregnant by the age of 17 and none went to college save for her. She was the one, I remember, who walked all the way into Media to keep her appointment at Planned Parenthood. I once caught her in our apartment fooling around with a tough leech of an Italian boy who had good abdominal muscles which he called "cut." Our apartment was robbed by one of his friends when he left the backdoor open. My daughter screamed at me for not throwing him out after the first week of leeching (before the robbery); finally I had to call his father to throw him out of our house because he would not stay in my son's room.
When she was 14 years old I had to take a business trip to Monterey, California. As the plane touched down on the runway at 11 pm local California time my cell phone rang. "I can't find your daughter. She's disappeared!" the baby sitter cried. My Juliet had climbed down from her second floor rooftop chamber with the assistance of Guttersnipe, the local Romeo from Garden City who helped her use the fireman's trick of sheets knotted together. I remember her tantrums when I sent out the police after her...And I remember several times when she smashed her fist through the panels of her armoire (it was a pretty cheap armoire). Throughout her childhood she scratched or threw our family pictures against the wall, smashing glass all over the place. As a kid, she had something like dyslexia but ended up loving to read and even made self-help tapes for me at age 9 to talk me out of my depressions regarding men. She reminded me, in form and function, of her father, but seemed to have other redeeming qualities that came out of no where.
My favorite was her "tire therapy," when she ran out our side door and leaped onto a large rubber tire swinging from a heavy rope tied to our lovely chestnut tree. She hung from the hole in the tire and dragged her bare feet in the mud beneath, telling me she played in the "tender mud" because it made her happy. These kinds of therapies were uplifting after my husband left and she could no longer stand my tears as I confessed my anguish and self-pity fruitlessly to my mother or sister on the phone. (I should have saved it all for a priest.)
She is 24 now, an independent curmudgeon who never appreciated a thing I did. She is also funny, devoted to me, and wild. As a kid, she drowned her pagers; she smoked and drank; she told me she was going to be a food scientist at the age of 5, pulling out every sauce and meat and mustard concoction from the refrigerator, adding soy sauce to strawberries or mixing cheese with maple syrup. In virtually every respect she did exactly what she wanted because she knew what she wanted.
At 14 she started catering at old folks homes. She read to Alzheimer's patients. She made a lot of friends with women and men I would have classified in another age and time as "low class" or even "trashy." Frequently they would cuss at me when I'd try to find out where she had disappeared, which was often. At one point, at the age of 16, she clocked me and gave me a bloody nose. All her girlfriends, Grainne excepted, got pregnant by the age of 17 and none went to college save for her. She was the one, I remember, who walked all the way into Media to keep her appointment at Planned Parenthood. I once caught her in our apartment fooling around with a tough leech of an Italian boy who had good abdominal muscles which he called "cut." Our apartment was robbed by one of his friends when he left the backdoor open. My daughter screamed at me for not throwing him out after the first week of leeching (before the robbery); finally I had to call his father to throw him out of our house because he would not stay in my son's room.
When she was 14 years old I had to take a business trip to Monterey, California. As the plane touched down on the runway at 11 pm local California time my cell phone rang. "I can't find your daughter. She's disappeared!" the baby sitter cried. My Juliet had climbed down from her second floor rooftop chamber with the assistance of Guttersnipe, the local Romeo from Garden City who helped her use the fireman's trick of sheets knotted together. I remember her tantrums when I sent out the police after her...And I remember several times when she smashed her fist through the panels of her armoire (it was a pretty cheap armoire). Throughout her childhood she scratched or threw our family pictures against the wall, smashing glass all over the place. As a kid, she had something like dyslexia but ended up loving to read and even made self-help tapes for me at age 9 to talk me out of my depressions regarding men. She reminded me, in form and function, of her father, but seemed to have other redeeming qualities that came out of no where.
My favorite was her "tire therapy," when she ran out our side door and leaped onto a large rubber tire swinging from a heavy rope tied to our lovely chestnut tree. She hung from the hole in the tire and dragged her bare feet in the mud beneath, telling me she played in the "tender mud" because it made her happy. These kinds of therapies were uplifting after my husband left and she could no longer stand my tears as I confessed my anguish and self-pity fruitlessly to my mother or sister on the phone. (I should have saved it all for a priest.)
Today, as the psychologist Mary Pipher might have predicted, she is a disciplined worker, a banquet supervisor at Marriott Corporation in Charlotte, and a creative marketer who writes well and still swings sadly into dis-ease when her fiance must take to the road to work.
She pays her bills, has a college degree, rails at me for allowing her to go to the school of her choosing (Johnson & Wales) instead of a "first-rate" school, which of course she refused to even consider when she was of the age to do so. She is a jumble of charms, fears, and resentments -- most of the resentment is reserved for me and the terrible mistakes I made as a young parent. She is still afraid of tackling an MBA, even though she seemed confident about it two years ago. For a while she seemed worried about making any career move without her fiance Jason, a very talented executive chef and all around Zen-like Southern boy who gleams when he looks at her.
A day ago in Charlotte she charged ahead of me when we walked on the streets. Finally I talked back and said she needed to walk with me even though I am loping and "slow."
But yesterday, after a thankless morning at a chic but impossibly priced bridal salon, after she charged ahead of me again forgetting to thank me for lunch, I was reminded how sullen I was and STILL CAN BE when I am upset. She reminds me of how lousy she is at housework, how incredibly loving she is toward Jason and her friends, and how occasionally loving she can really be toward me, wrapping her arms around my neck and saying, "I'm really appre--appre-cia-tive of that dress." Yes, that incredible dress, which she found on the fairyland mannequin of herself at New York Bridal salon in the middle of a strip mall outside Charlotte. She found the right fitter, a girl named Mona with lovely dark skin, her smile cracking open, as Grainne's did after the fourth or fifth try on. She was in bliss. Mona brought a half-size Mannequin of a groom (cut off at the knees) so she could stand next to him and compare their "looks." And yes, with her bridal party of dearest friends David and Kristin cheering her on with tears and extravagant exclamations, Grainne poured into that antique lacy confection showing all her curves like buttermilk pouring into a gelatin mold. We knew, after a dozen more try-ons, that she had found her happy fit; that gorgeous thing every bride wants. And I also realized, no matter what, she would walk down an aisle I've never taken and be braver than I have ever been. Because it is not easy to surrender oneself to another person and agree to share another's fate; and this is precisely what she has done.
Bridal Party Cheering Squad: Dave, Grainne, Kristin
And so, with the agony and ecstasy of this daughter, I celebrate her tire therapy once again and hope she will swing swing swing up and out with all the happiness and unexpected twists and turns of a new life.
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