You Can't Have Yesterday Again

The Boston Herald

She had thin, blond hair that curled slightly on the ends where it just covered her neck, and blue eyes that were a little too close, and a tiny pug nose, and she was sucking on a binky, and clinging to a white teddy bear.  The sight of her in the dim light at church took my breath away. She looked, at that moment, so much like my youngest daughter that I forgot that she couldn't be this daughter, that this daughter is a young woman now, in college, in New York. Even Teddy is now old and worn and gray. But for a few seconds, there was Teddy new again and there was Julie, small, in front of me, within arm's reach.

It was a trick, of course, fancy, imagination, the result of fading day and soft candlelight. This child's eyes were darker than my child's. This child had eyebrows you could see three pews away. And yet, for an instant, I didn't notice the differences. I only saw the impossible.

I called Julie and told her about the child in church and she said, "That's weird, Mom," because she had gone to church, too, that very morning and something similar had happened. "I went to an Episcopal church with a friend of mine, and the service was an hour and 40 minutes long, and we sang all eight verses of the opening hymn, and the church smelled like Grandma, and the priest sounded like John Jackson, and I sat there and was so sad I wanted to cry.” 

All the time she was a child and forced to sit through services she'd wanted to cry, too, but for a different reason. Then she was bored and eager to have the church part over so she could run upstairs into the church hall with her best friend, Sarah, and drink pink punch and eat whatever cookies someone had made.

But now, all these years later, it was a different kind of sadness that filled her. It wasn't that she missed the Episcopal church, she said. She didn't. But sitting there on the hard wooden pews, breathing in the incense and the familiar hymns, being in a place that was so similar to where she spent the Sunday mornings of her childhood, she ached suddenly for all that was: Caryn taking her to church; Dickie Bower lighting the altar candles; Grandma up there in choir in her blue satin robe; the Thomases filling an entire bench; and Sarah waiting for her outside her Sunday school door.

"It's not like I can go back there and have it be that way again. That's what struck me, Mom. Grandma doesn't sing in the choir anymore. John Jackson's retired. Dickie's in the Navy. And Sarah and I are grown up."

Everything changes, even the small things, but most times you're so caught up in how things are, that you don't think much about how things were.

Then something strikes you: A little girl in church who looks like your own looked a long time ago; or a woman singing in the choir who sounds so familiar and you're back there again, only not really. Because you can't go back. And that's what makes you sad.

I miss being a little kid, my big kid says.

Missing is a part of life, I tell her. I missed my childhood when I was her age, too. I missed that my best friend didn't live down the street anymore. I missed that someone came along and built houses in the woods where we played. I missed everything I gave up in order to grow up. I continue to miss things that I never imagined I'd miss.

Ellen, my neighbor from across the street, comes over a day later with a gift. It is a picture of our daughters when they were small. On the back of the picture Ellen has taped a quotation: "I am thinking about mothering. How we try to raise our children to find their own paths. They grow up and leave home as they should. As we want them to do. But the leaving makes a hole in our existence."

All leaving makes a hole. Our memories fill in these spaces, but not totally. You look back and you see what was, and even when you're happy with what is, you hurt because you can't have both, yesterday and today.