Imagine being old enough to be dropping your daughter off at college while still inwardly being dropped off at college yourself.
Remember how pink and still forming I was, and here is this concert pianist serious daughter (except math is her piano) and I feel younger than her, looking at her.
Visiting this beach that will be her home, when she was crying so HARD a month ago for not getting into the school she wanted and here is her new place on the coast, in this place that could only be where estranged Hawaiian kings wash up and declare their new kingdoms, this quivering edge of where beauty hangs growing, shrugging like it’s nothing, by a breathless cliff, this Santa Barbara.
I was looking at Emma in the car on the way back with her leg up on the dash, playing her music, in her clothes she’s comfortable in, with her tan she’s been working on after never doing anything but work for the last 12 years, and I know every piece of her shape, the way she walks, the smell of her, her loud cussing laugh, her devotion to boy bands and quiet girl renegades, the way her heart has fringe on the edges like a sea anemone, where nothing is wasted, all is gathered and held close.
She knows what’s important, and has been able to balance it with a gymnast’s precision since she was naked chasing Nathan around the driveway in a plastic car. They were always naked. Because why not? They were perfect.
I was thinking about her with the background blurring out the window, the farmland road we take to the beach in the fake countryside that helps us feel like we’re not in Los Angeles, and I think about how much work it takes to form and then grow a luscious, ripe, superior person, and how much was actually already in her, I just made the pancakes. How lucky I got to make the pancakes for this person and watch every ripple of her life. And now here is my second one, I set her in the lifeboat and shove her off and with Nathan it was so confusing, first one, would he ever come back, did I waste my time – but then he hasn’t gone, he is still right here, wondering if we’re doing an easter egg hunt this year and he’s almost 20.
So then Emma, #2, I can set her off with a sort of freedom, knowing where she is, that she doesn’t have to love everything we did or didn’t do, that she got to go to that concert when she was 12 at the Rose Bowl because Barry said these are things that make up your LIFE not just annoying extra things that I don’t have time for, no these are the things, he said.
Watching her next to that blurry car window, he is right. The concert. The little tiny elementary school where we knew all the teachers, we were there every step of the way. When I felt like I had no more energy but we showed up anyway, at the book fair and the talent show at the dance concert, at the football games, at back to school night, why does it all come at you so hard and so much
Because then you are in the car and the ocean is taking your daughter and you made a deal with the sea witch to take care of her and let her grow and meet people and study and laugh for god’s sake and have us in her every step of the way because we are her background music and
she is our flower
