Buddha Baby Turns Tween (turns bride)

A mother's reflections from 20/20 hindsight

This is my twenty-seven year old daughter’s birthday month. She will be married this September. She is the opposite of a Bridezilla. She’s the picture of grace, kindness, inclusivity, abiding love for her partner and her world. I’m finding myself pouring over old photos of her, like I’m looking for something. Something that I need to store away in order to move into this next chapter of her life. I haven’t been sure what that something is, until today when I stumbled upon this essay that I wrote when she was eleven and acting very very tween. I think the something that I have been looking for is the reminder that no matter what, you can never take away a memory. Especially of a lullaby between a mother and her child. No matter how your child lives, who she loves, and what your role becomes, there was a time when it was just the two of you. And that will always live somewhere inside you, safe.

Here is:

Buddha Baby Turns Tween

(in honor of all the mothers of tweens)

I keep having nightmares that my eleven year old daughter is dying or in danger of dying.  And I can’t get to her.  They wake me at three in the morning, and I’m so panicked that I lie there, trying to shake it off, trying to breathe and see what’s real…and I go to her room and that’s her, in her new bed from Pottery Barn Teen, sleeping in her braids, the blue light from her I-Home showing me that she is still alive, and that she is so suddenly grown-up.  When she was little, I’d get up in the night and put my finger just under her tiny nose to feel the warm ebb and flow; put my hand on her chest and feel it lift and lower.  Sometimes I’d kiss her forehead or if I knew she was fast enough asleep, kiss her vulnerable un-objecting lips.  I do it now.

At first I attributed this to the early loss of two of my childhood friends—one to brain cancer, the other to a drunk driver.  But it was not until this morning that I realized that this has nothing to do with old pain or nihilism.  Or even necessarily with abandonment issues.  It has everything to do with the loss of the “little” in my little girl.

She was a Buddha Baby, everybody said.  An Old Soul.  Flight attendants would stop at our aisle where she’d be draped over my chest fast asleep, and say, “It’s so nice to see such a sweet mother/daughter relationship.  Believe me, it’s rare.”  Restaurateurs would comment on how calm she was, sitting for long dinners mouthing a baguette, amending the adult conversation when she felt the urge, with big ideas that usually started with, “Actually...”  Her teachers said she was the kind of child who didn’t go bounding into things; took her time.  “That’s a good character trait to have,” they said.  And they trusted her because of it and maybe even treated her more tenderly than the kids who couldn’t necessarily control their mouths and certainly not their appendages.  So I can honestly say, without bragging or distortion, that my little girl was an angel child.  I’m telling you, she was.

 “Sing my Maisy song,” she’d beg at bedtime, and I’d sing her the Alison Krauss song that starts, “It’s amazing how you can speak right to my heart…”  She had a talent for harmony and could pick them out of thin air and we’d lie in bed after reading The Secret Garden or Curious George, (which she called Minkey Joe), or Garden Of Verses, and sing.  She loved a particular sea shanty called The Golden Vanity because it was long.  In fact, this all began with The Golden Vanity.  “It’s a depressing song,” she announced one night.  “Please don’t sing it any more.” 

At first I took it badly, but it is a depressing song, I rationalized.  About a vainglorious cabin boy who eventually drowns.  What was I thinking singing that to her for all her formative years?  So I found some perky songs—bought her the Free to be You And Me album, which I was obsessed with as a child.  She didn’t like it.  Annie didn’t do much for her either, and maybe it had something to do with playing the soundtrack continuously on an eight-hour road trip to Seattle.  She got carsick on that trip, and now that I think of it, there are probably some terrorists groups that use this soundtrack as a torture device.

“I don’t really like singing at bedtime any more,” she said when she was about ten.

“That’s okay,” I said, but I cried myself to sleep that night, only to wake up at three am in a sweat, needing to leap up and check that my daughter was alive.

I don’t consider myself an overly controlling mother.  My first words to my daughter were, “You can be anything you want to be.”  But what I realized this morning was that I miss her little cheeks, her little voice and the constant naming of her five non-existent cats.  I miss Jeeduts and Bobbits, and Suchits, and Cadis, and Kleeklow.  I miss her sweaty head, heavy in my arms, and the little round of pudge just below the inside of her knees.  I miss how much she loved me no matter what my hair looked like in the morning, or what I said to a friend in the grocery store, or what kind of jeans I had on.  I miss my little girl who, no matter what I do, just isn’t little any more.  And on top of it all, I can’t help create her anymore.  Not like I could.

Now, she comes in to my bed at 7:00 am, in her long braids, pissed that it’s another cruel day in which she will not have a snow day, and in which she will be forced to suffer the consequences of my cooking, and the drudgery of family life.  Getting out the door will be brutal hell for her; just the act of zipping up her parka will bring her to boiling frustration.  She will tell her little brother to shut up, even though all he said was, “You’ve got it inside out,” and she’ll yell at me even though all I said was, “Do you want turkey and cheese or ham and cheese,” and then she’ll yell at the cat for meowing too loudly. 

When she was little she said to me once, “You know Mama, your food is always made with love.”  There’ll be none of that today.  There will be eyeball rolls for every one of the following:  Please feed the dog.  You have a piano lesson today.  Would you please pick up your room for the house keeper?  Have you brushed your teeth?  And that includes:  I love you so much.  And I am so proud of you.  In fact, her eyeballs will gain such rotation that I’ll worry for eyestrain, but I won’t dare add that to her list of misery.

David Letterman could make this funny.  I’m not trying to.  I’m in love with a little girl who has left me and suddenly there’s this pre-teen in my bed at 7:00 am who, granted has voluntarily climbed in bed with me, but it’s because she’s trying to get out of piano lessons.  And when I put my hand on her back, she swats it away.  But then she says, “Will you scratch my back?  Here?  NO, here!  No, HERE!  Ugh.  Never mind.”  Swat.

This child is not a brat.  This child is the one people still stop me in the street to compliment.  This is natural, I tell myself.  In order to leave the nest, we must defy it.  We must lust for the world outside the nest to have faith in that treacherous launch.  But she’s only eleven.  Does she have to start so soon?  Two seconds ago, she was crying to have her diaper changed, and afterward, slipping her little fingers around my finger.  It’s not like this is any great surprise.  But what is a surprise to me is this:  I don’t particularly like this eleven-year-old kid.  She’s disrespectful and she hurts my feelings and says things like, “I’m never going to let myself get fat.”  I feel used. 

When I’m feeling mature, I can say:  I know motherhood is the true selfless act, we fall head-over-heels in love with our little ones, and then we mourn the loss of them with the same stream.  But we move on.

In my not-so-mature moments, it’s more like this:  It’s a scam and I fell for it!  If they came out eleven, we’d be horrified.  We wouldn’t even particularly like them, never mind love them enough to feed them decent food.  We’d give them dog food.  We’d give our dogs the steaks, because our dogs would look up at us with those droopy loving eyes and lick their lips and wag their tails, and later rest their heads on our stomachs as we watch the television show we want to watch, not them.  The whole thing’s a set up to continue the species!  Those cute little beings are programmed to, at all odds, get the steak!  And then, just when you’re used to giving it to them, just when you’ve learned to cut it into tiny pieces, simultaneously prepared to listen lovingly about their five non-existent cats for the eight hundredth time and give them the Heimlich maneuver, they want to become a vegetarian.

And what if my daughter becomes a really non-Buddha teenager?  What if she gets into all the trouble you hear about with boys and drugs and cars?  How will I feel about her then?  And what if she hates my guts?  What if she rats on me to her friends and teachers and her friends’ parents; different than my seven-year old writing down on the Mother’s Day card he made in school, “My Mommy loves me and red wine.”  She could really do some damage if she wanted to.  And why wouldn’t she want to?  I’m evil—I make her take piano lessons and cook her homemade chicken soup with real live carrots!

Between you and me, I’m a cool mom.  The coolest.  I take my kids out of school and fly them to Belize for three weeks, and take them horseback riding and dog sledding in Montana where we live-- in a ski town where they spend every Saturday from December to daffodil time taking all-day skiing lessons with their buddies.  Oh, and this spring we’re touring Arizona in a camper, which makes me a really cool mom, don’t you think?  Two kids and a snoring husband in a camper for two weeks?  Come on.  Throw me a frickin’ bone!

I’m not saying that my motherhood is reserved for the cute and pudgy and compliant.  I just miss her, that’s all.  She’s not coming back.  She was a person in my house who I lived with for eight, nine years, rubbing her back and her head every night, lying in her bed, reading, and talking about God and the moon and singing together in harmony.  And even when she dropped of to sleep, I’d stay and listen to her breathe sometimes, and when I’d gently sneak out of her bed, her little hand would come out of her sheets and grab my arm and pull me back in.  She didn’t care what my breath smelled like or if I sang her long sad songs or if I was four minutes late to pick her up from school.  She liked peas then, and corn and carrots and red meat.  She liked me. 

I just miss her, that’s all. 

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