Reason Number 14: Quotes out of books

The fourteenth reason for not crying during your daughter’s senior year in high school is quotes from podcasts and books.

This is a silly reason to cry for someone who has been a voracious and insatiable reader since kindergarten since the sheer volume of words consumed might cause dozens of tears in a given week.  The emergence of podcasts in the last few years has created yet further opportunities for immersing my life in words and has created even more opportunities for not crying.

I did not cry, for instance, when I read the following in a book by one of my favorite authors this week.  The fact that the book baby actually shares a name with my beloved girl is a silly coincidence, of course, and not at all a reason to cry.  

Having a baby had been like starting a demanding new job and beginning a passionate love affair and moving to a new country with a different language and culture all at the same time.  The baby filled her mind, her heart, and her senses.  She wanted to inhale her, to gobble her up.  The love she felt for Grace seemed to permanently hover on a knife’s edge between joy and terror.  “Babies are pretty resilient,” Patrick’s mother would say when Ellen expressed her concern about anything.  And Ellen wanted to say, “Are you kidding?  They can die in their sleep.”  Once when her mother was visiting, Ellen came out of the nursery from checking on Grace and said, “I love her so much it’s just...”. 

“Excruciating?” supplied her mother.  “I know.  It doesn’t really get any better.  You just... Learn to live with it.”  Ellen met her mother’s eyes which now reminded her of her daughter’s eyes.  She’d always known that the fierce, furious way Anne looked at her was because she was trying to hide how much she loved her as if love was a weakness.  She had always considered it one of her mother’s more adorable flaws.  

“If only she could be more like me... open to love.”  Now, for the first time, she understood that her mother wasn’t resisting love so much as bearing it.  Now she knew that you could love so much it literally hurt.  An actual pain in the center of her chest.  Fortunately, whenever her feelings threatened to become impossibly transcendent, the banalities of motherhood were there to bring her back to earth.  You couldn’t be carried away with sentiment when you were dealing with an exploding nappy or trying to work out why avocado and cottage cheese were no longer acceptable.  And the constant wondering, “Is she tired?  Or hungry?  Or teething?  And what is that monotonous Ah Ah Ah sound she is making and how can we make her stop?”  From The Hypnotist’s Love Story by Liane Moriarty.

Ugh.  Not crying.

I’m not crying because a podcast I listened to this week said that when you are overcome by emotion because of art of some sort, it is God speaking to you, and you should try and understand what it means.  What’s to understand?  This is just exactly how it felt to love my Grace as an infant—excruciating and banal, a literal hurt that I continue to bear furiously and fiercely as I watch the growing up years wind down and the days slip away.

I’m not crying because when Grace was born my generally unsentimental mom got that fierce look in her own eyes as she met mine over her little strawberry blonde head.  “Remember that story I always told you?” she asked quietly.  “About how when you were born I called Grandma Sue Sue and said, ‘I never knew you could love someone this much.  I never understood how much you loved me until now.’”  I had nodded, then, and probably cried because I was jacked up on pregnancy hormones and experiencing the truly life changing moment of meeting your first child and understanding a mother’s love from both sides for the first time.  You can’t gaze into the impossibly beautiful face of the greatest possible love and not cry, but you can read a silly book and keep it together.  You can connect a little moment in a cute little novel with a story from your own life.  It’s not hard when the names are a bit jumbled but all there—Ellen is my mom’s name, Grace is my daughter, SuzANNE is my grandmother—because sometimes God plays his cards without much subtlety like that.  It’s just a book and if you cried over every book you read you would never stop.  I’m not crying.  You’re crying.  

Reason Number 13: Early Mornings

 The thirteenth reason for not crying in your daughter’s senior year of high school is early mornings.

In spite of it being my namesake, I’ve never been a huge fan of the beginning of the day.  I hate getting up early, though most of being a grown up and a mom is about getting up early (and learning to drink your coffee black).  Not crying.  (Well, maybe I am crying a little about giving up sweet creamer in my coffee).

This weekend found me and my middle daughter up and on the road before sunrise both days.  I snapped the photo above with my phone which was mounted to the dashboard displaying directions to yet another unknown gymnasium in another town.   As my daughter snoozed beside me and I sipped my (black) coffee, my mind drifted to the dozens, perhaps hundreds, of mornings just like this one when I had found myself taxiing my older daughter to sports’ competitions—early on swimming and soccer, later always volleyball.   As the years went by, our trips grew longer and longer; the teams she played for got better and the travel became more extensive.  It was hours and days and entire weekends of having her mostly or entirely to myself, at least in the car.  Abruptly, it seems those days are behind us as she sleeps late and I travel away from her into the next chapter of sports’ mom life.  Not crying.

I remembered the conversations my husband and I had as Grace’s talent grew to require more competitive teams further and further from home.  Could we honestly spare entire weekends away for long months at a time?  Could we find time in our schedules for the long hours on the road?  Was it even wise?  Would it not be smarter and certainly less costly to keep our girl on local teams playing against local talent?  Would we not be more likely to raise our daughter in the way we wanted by having dinner with the family at our kitchen table at home instead of consuming countless meals in our minivans as we raced across the state to one event or another?  We tentatively, uncertainly agreed to one team, then another, stand on the cusp of accepting yet another.  Did we do right?  Did she feel our love from the driver’s seat as she slept?  From the sidelines as she competed?  Across the table at all those restaurant meals with strangers (teammates and parents who would eventually become a network of lovely friends across the state)?  But it is wasteful and pointless to second guess and what-if your parenting decisions at this point in the game.   She loved playing sports and we loved (eventually, after many “what the eff are we doing?” Conversations) watching her play and having time with just her.  Not crying.

Having lots of kids is often a game of crisis management.  Like my uncle was known to quip after the birth of his third son—more than two children requires parents to switch from man to man to zone defense.  We covered whoever came into our area, desperately trying to manage the most urgent of matters of the child nearest to us as we were forced to parent 2 or 3 or more kids at any one time.   One on one time was vanishingly infrequent, especially with a well behaved and reliable oldest who was handling her most basic needs (and often those of one or more younger siblings) by the time she was barely three years old.  At the age of 8, she was the big, beloved babysitter and second mom to no fewer than four other children.  We spent so little time with just her.  Until she started traveling for volleyball, and circumstances forced one or sometimes both of us to devote entire weekends to just her.  Weekends that began behind the wheel of a mini-van before sunrise.  Precious hours and days that slipped through our fingers in a frenzy of planning and complaining and driving and anonymous hotel rooms and fast food.  Did we savor them enough?  Are they over forever now?   Not crying.

Who will take the wheel for her next year?  Will anyone smile as she snuggles beneath a silly, babyish yellow tie blanket she made for herself out of lion imprinted baby fabric that tickled her not-quite-fully-grown-up-heart?  Will anyone hand her a ziplock bag full of snacks to sustain her during long hours in convention centers converted to hundreds of volleyball courts, or refill her water bottle, or hand over her own deodorant or hair tie when she forgets hers?  The reality is, she has been taking care of most of these things for herself for years now.  I’m not much of a concierge mom, really.  I think more about doing such things for my children than I actually do, especially for this independent oldest child.  She has had to be responsible for most everything she needs and does her entire life, parented as she’s been by a mom perpetually distracted and exhausted by the caring of so many others.  Not crying.  

I’m not crying about how viscerally I felt the lack of my oldest with me Saturday morning.  I enjoy the beginning of this journey with my middle daughter.  I like the conversations we are starting to have when the hum of the tires on the highway and the monotony of the Midwest farm landscape creates a safety that enables unexpected conversation.  I’ve never been able to recreate these moments of intimacy anywhere else.  It’s possible this is the end of these moments with Grace, though of course there are lots of other ways to make these beautiful and sweet memories that don’t involve absurdly early wake up calls and hours of driving.  I’m not crying.  You’re crying.  

Reason Number 12: Halloween Costumes

The twelfth reason for not crying during your daughter’s senior year of high school is matching Halloween costumes.

This is an utterly absurd reason to cry because we have never once worn matching family Halloween costumes—not one time in the 18 Octobers we have spent together with our beloved girl.  We have had lots of conversations on this topic—usually over mountains of Halloween candy as we ambitiously pontificate on the following year.  From this safe duration—over 300 days before we might reasonably expected to actually do anything—we have had some very aggressive plans.  I recall one hilarious conversation about a potential “Shrek” theme.  The discussion went something like this:

Grace:  “Dad can be Shrek and Mom can be Fiona.  Sam can be donkey, and Claire can be the gingerbread man.”

Me:  “What about you, Grace?”

Grace: “I want to be Puss in Boots.”

Sam (whining):  “Noooooooo.  I am way more of a Puss than Grace!!”

Chad (with a wicked sideways glance at me):  “And there you have it.”

I can almost understand crying over actual memories that I have with my daughter, but I’m certainly not going to cry over memories I don’t have.  We have never been one of those cutesy families who come to school events all decked out in matching, themed gear.  I’ve never been the creative, artsy type of mom who delighted in such advance preparation and adventurous costuming.  Nearly 100% of Halloweens have found us trudging to Party City and hastily scanning the posted costume options, choosing individually, and purchasing rapidly after a brief trip through the plastic and Styrofoam prop aisle.  I have spent hundreds—probably thousands—on their costumes over the years, but I’ve never once insisted upon a family theme.  Not crying.

This year, the elementary school contest featured a darling family of pandas, an adorable stewardess/pilot/airplane combo, and an Aladdin ensemble (including a genie dad whose face was painted such a vivid blue I’m guessing he was scraping face paint out of cracks and crevices for a month).  I accompanied the two remaining elementary school Luekens in our obvious theme of “exhausted mom, a ninja, and a cowgirl”.  Shockingly, we did not win the contest. 

When I snapped the photo above, I clearly wasn’t crying because Halloween, like most holidays for a mom of five, has felt for years like something I just wanted to get through.  All the magic making falls so heavily on the mom’s shoulders, and it’s generally all I can handle just to make sure each child has something (anything!) to wear and that our Halloween candy isn’t purchased so early that none remains when the doorbell starts ringing on the 31st.  Cajoling my dreamy princesses and warriors into something family themed (and, most years, warm enough) was generally beyond my powers of persuasion and negotiation.  It is true that I was a bit more engaged early in Grace’s trick-or-treating career.  I never know whether to lament or celebrate the fact that she got the youngest and most energetic mom of all my offspring.  I hadn’t quite surrendered all my aspirations and visions for how holidays should look in the earlier years of her childhood (it took several of her less cooperative siblings to finally break me of some of that), but for some reason we just never went the route of a family theme.  Not crying.

And now it’s too late.  She has no costume this year, at least to my knowledge, and if she ends up needing one she will happily collect my credit card and best wishes to outfit herself.  We have no family events to attend in matching costumes this year, anyway, and even if we did she probably wouldn’t be available to join us.  It is looking increasingly likely that she’ll be on a college visit with her best friend the night of trick-or-treat anyway.  Not crying.

When Grace was tiny, I first heard the song “Slipping through my fingers” by Abba at a live performance of Mamma Mia.  I don’t think Grace could even walk at the time, and since I took her well-behaved little self everywhere with me that first year, she was perched on my lap, eagerly watching the performance right with me.  When this song played during a sentimental mother/daughter scene, I clutched my girl even tighter and choked up (I was so much more likely to cry about her back then).  The refrain contains the following line “What happened to those wonderful adventures?  The places I had planned for us to go?  Well, some of them we did, but most we didn’t, and why?  I just don’t know.”  This song plays through my head at random, inconvenient times in this season of a thousand tiny goodbyes with my precious girl.  We never dressed in a family themed costume, and now we probably never will.  Why?  I just don’t know.  I’m not crying, you’re crying.