I feel like I failed my daughter.
I'm sitting in her room, the room I was never allowed in because her cold shoulder took up most of it. As soon as we got home from dropping her off at college I took care of the horses and my mom and dogs and then I went in her room.
Piles of clothes. Gift bags shoeboxes. She only took up a very small part of this room. Just the edge of her bed where she and her phone had a very peaceful life.
I stuffed all the clothes in the closet. I put a red sheet over the dirty rug. I plugged in a clock and a lamp. This is my room now. My office now. I get to be where you aren't.
I hate seeing that she showed us so very little of her life or herself. She found us confounding and annoying. She found us embarrassing and in the way.
We dropped her in a room with two other girls. She will have no privacy. She has a communal bathroom. Someone else will make her meals. She will be off her phone. She will be looking around. She will be laughing.
She didn't want to go to college. She is at college because I made her fill out the applications. We made her take the hard classes. We toured the schools. She was busy as a teenager should be, listening to music. Daydreaming. Buying stuff at thrift stores.
She is in a place where she can't be lonely now. That is where we didn't fail her. I read her a poem from a kid book, an ee poem, I carry your heart. I carry it in my heart.
I started crying in her dorm room, with Nathan and Brie and Barry and Bess because even though she never loved us the way I wished so hard she would, she turned the other cheek since she was 12, but reading that poem, and reading goodnight moon to her in her bed I started crying. Because she is so much like me really. She is alone.
She isn't going to find peace at college. She will find alot of things so challenging like fixing her bike. Eating food. Not having dogs. She will not miss me because she does not know how much she means to me because she never used me. She never loved me the way I needed. I needed love as much as she did, and both of us did things the same way, running away from things that matter.
Maybe that's why it hurts so much, after 25 years and three babies all grown and flown. To not feel like you did everything right. Even when you did everything you could and when the last one didn't want you around you started training horses. Horses like you. Horses will never be the baby that you nurtured and adored and waitered for.
There is nothing else that matters.
On the way to the school we were driving over a high up bridge and Nathan said this is a big suicide bridge.
I can see that relief. To be done and then to say okay I'm picking when I'm done, and this job was too hard. Tonight at midnight on the day of my last child leaving, I would say yes it is too hard. You can't love them into loving you. They're gonna do what they want to do.
I feel like I shouldn't have listened to Emma when she told me Lilly was mean, and I started treating her with more criticism.
I just don't want a cold family. I couldn't bear going to that concert with her one of her last days because I didn't want to be standing for 10 hours with a person who would not talk to me or let me touch her.
It's like a bad break up.
I think it is late and my marriage I see the holes, but my family is here around me. I have a son and his girlfriend and our house that houses us all. I have lots of love. I have a full garage that I can tackle bit by bit but there is no glory in getting rid of everything that mattered to you. I have a husband who was falling asleep in the car on the way home because he is old and he will leave too eventually.
I can't bear it I don't think. The moving of life.
I will try to go to the beach and practice surfing. I will ride to clear my mind. I will have a quiet sunday like every other day while it's still warm, riding and swimming and cleaning.
I will miss the tending. Because even though she didn't show it I know she felt our love. I know my actions made a good person and we grew her alive to this place, in that school by the sea. She'll be okay. She will thrive. I feel my life is over.
It was too hard anyway. I feel like how b feels when bruce yells at him. All that matters is the kids. That's all we have.
My life job is done. The biggest chunk of it is done. This is how it feels to succeed. It feels like looking in a mirror at a bar in bad lighting and saying wait this is it? This is how it feels to actually do something RIGHT? it's like being on a splintered raft in the ocean.
That's what they should tell you. When you have your baby. That at the end they leave and you are a splintered raft. Would you do it
You would
I wake up the morning after we dropped you at college after sleeping in your bed. I got home, shoved all your clothes into the closet, opened the window and jammed the fan in to make it fresh, got in your lumpy bed like the momma bear in the 3 bears, got mad that you were sleeping like this, to tired to fix it, dogs happy to be in your room and then had a fitful night. But I wanted to be in my house, in the house where I had all the kids crawling around me, not out in dementia land a little known subdivision that no one visits because no one answers the door when you knock. And Barry took over the big bedroom which he would call our bedroom but there never was an our bedroom in my mind, there was a bed full of kids and then I got out of there. So I can't face the hole that is that relationship, especially after the drive home where he was falling asleep in the car because he's 84 and he had a young man's trip to Germany where he was up all night and at home all he can do is watch politics and sit in a chair and sleep nude which he's now decided he wants to do cause he read it was good for you.
This morning I woke up and got up to clean up mom and give her a pill and juice and then go out to much the horses and chickens who were waiting to be fed and it wasn't til I got the rake in my hand to muck the shit that I looked up and saw the wave coming.
It was rage. i mucked and cried and I wasn't crying because I missed my daughter. I was crying because I missed OUT on my daughter, the one I wanted that doesn't exist. I realized with horror that this is how b feels about his brother donny and how he must feel about his relationship with me. Living with Bess since she was 12 when she lost a basketball game and I went to hug her and she turned away, rejecting me for the very first time ever and leaving me holding all the bags of love - I have lived in that for the last 6 years.
I had rage for all the love I had that was unused and all the arms I had hanging wasted not requested, the basics of human existence, connection, humor, love, affection, wiped clean like a target whiteboard. Which we just bought for her dorm room door.
She would not allow love, she was the hoover dam of affection.
As I mucked I felt what was under all that anger and then flowed the tears because all of it was hurt. An arrow pronged heart just shredded from living in a relationship that should have broken up years ago and now the guy might be too old to want to fix anything oh wait that's the OTHER relationship, and I take full responsibility for being the hoover dam. But then did I create Bess being removed from love because she saw how I blocked love in my own life?
I think all this painful mucking, this is how things get opened up and maybe change is possible. My body wants to let go of all this pain but there may not be a water tower big enough to hold all the tears of rage humiliation sadness horror neglect to self, beauty because there is always beauty no matter how difficult
huh
in the middle of writing this Bess just called me
Huh
head tilt
maybe there needed to be some separation to find the love. Maybe we take our connection that isn't lost to the wind and carry it forward into a new place
All I know is I bought four pairs of stirrups on the drive home at 10 pm in simi vallley so some obsessions never end
You told me not to change your bed so I won't, you said you met someone named Clayton who's from a small town and rides horses and is her zach and a billie eilish lover
she and her roommates walked down the hall and there was a door that said knock if you want to say hi and they did and there were a bunch of people in there
