Upon becoming exactly that kind of mother
Some of you may know, because I talked to you about it excessively, that I had certain feelings about driving Nora to high school last year. The school is only a mile away, I’d say to anyone who would listen, and driving her there is an inconvenient interruption on already busy mornings. An out and back that negated the possibility of any “flow.” But I’d often do it anyway, grudgingly, with my ceramic mug of coffee along for the ride. I’d plop it down, all wobbly, right there in the console meant for non-breakable travel mugs. It was like I could not possibly emphasize enough, through words or actions, how inconvenient this was for me.
I wanted her (unless the weather was truly terrible) to walk. Or, I wanted us to make a plan concerning this repeated offense. Maybe J could drive her on his way to work, making this errant ride a purposeful one. But she never got in the habit of getting up early enough to walk and we never made a sensible plan, greeting each morning as though something - magic, or a sudden burst of willpower - might have intervened in the night, solving the issue for us without the practical matter of having to do the solving part.
This year, though, a good friend who lives a bit farther out in town transferred to Nora’s high school and, starting on the first day of school, was dropped off at our house early enough that the two of them, they could walk. Walk and enjoy each other’s company and some conversation before the day began, something I’d suggested many times, referencing other friends who live - I mean! - right on the way to school if one was - for instance! - walking there. And this habit of walking has continued, with the exception of her friend’s mom driving them both on the recent mornings too dark and cold in the very depths of winter (for which I am eternally grateful).
So, on a recent morning when Nora showed up outside our bedroom door to explain that her friend was sick and what, exactly, was she going to do because, at that point, it was “really too late to walk,” it was just like old times. But without my immediate and aggressive resentment. It had been too long! I’d grown unaccustomed. My mug three-quarters full of hot coffee, my pajamas still on, I knew my part from muscle memory. “I could take you,” I said.
I drove her like before, but now charmed at the opportunity. I used to use these drives to deliver a lecture on the reasons I should not be partaking in them, but this time I inquired about her schedule that day, chattered about politics; the attempts at eager discourse a teenager really hates first thing in the morning. Nora and I often discuss the mismatch of our energy: I’m ready to take on the world and talk out its issues upon waking, while Nora comes to life around 8:30 p.m., just as I am descending into the depths of exhaustion and the inability to talk at all. We laugh at the incongruity.
The thing about an oldest child is that you live through every stage of growing up, and of parenting, for the first time with them. Over, and over, again. It’s difficult, impossible really, to imagine what you’ll miss some day.
I think sometimes about those older, more knowledgeable moms, grandmothers, too, who tell the younger ones - who once told me - that it “goes so fast.” Such a trite phrase, such an overused maxim. And yet, I’m her now, eyeing the woman with a fussy child at the grocery store, desperate to say something, wise enough to stay quiet, because it’s the kind of point you have to come to yourself. So I attempt to impart my learned experience through osmosis, throwing brain waves across the produce section. Hold on, I think in her direction. Hold on tight.