In every end, there's a beginning

The Boston Globe

Beverly Beckham

I found it in a card shop in Concord, N.H. - Caardvark's, a place that is now closed. It was hanging on a wall and it was perfect.

I'd been looking for perfect. My daughter was newly engaged and I wanted something special to celebrate the moment.

For this was my baby who was getting married, my youngest child leaving home not for a little while, not for college, or for a summer, or to test her wings. But to fly away - with someone else - forever.

The 8-by-10 print said it all. It was of Winnie the Pooh and Piglet, best friends, standing side by side at the end of a long, happy path. Beneath them were these words:

"Have we reached the end?" asked Pooh.

"Yes, I suppose it seems so ... and yet"

"Yes, Piglet?"

"It is also the beginning."

It was a beginning for Julie. I knew this. But I believed it was the end for me.

I sang to her every night, when she was small, "Stay little, stay little, little, little stay," to the tune of "Hosanna" from "Jesus Christ, Superstar." I sang to her in her cradle, in her crib, in her big-girl bed.

But the song was just a song and not a spell. She kept right on growing despite my incantation. And though it may have worked magic in some other way - she majored in musical theater and now sings and dances for a living - it did not stop or even slow down time.

My daughter was like all daughters, metamorphosing even as I watched, shedding one skin for another - 12, 16, 20 - a child, a girl, a woman, growing, changing, evolving right before my eyes. She wasn't just one dazzling butterfly. She was an array of them, a blessing like her sister before her and like her brother who was first.

She was always on the fly, too, going somewhere, so I was used to kissing her goodbye - for a weekend with a school group, for a summer theater program, for a school year, then for whole years. She lived in New York City when she got engaged. She was already, like her brother and sister before, gone.

But she came home sometimes. And when she did, she came home to me.

Her engagement was the end of this. This is life. This is how the story is supposed to end. It was natural that she leave her father and me behind.

But it wasn't an end. Piglet was right. The end was a beginning not only for my daughter but for me, too.

She has an infant and a 3-year-old now. And she lives close by, not in New York anymore.

I was watching Charlotte, the newborn, while Julie ran errands with her son last week, and I saw, hung in a new place, on the wall above Charlotte's crib, the Pooh print. And I read it again and it struck me how true those words are. How doors close but other doors open. How an end is always a beginning.

I didn't understand this that day in the card store. I couldn't imagine that there could be another path as encompassing and engrossing as the one I had been on since the day my first child was born.

I thought my job was finished. I thought my days of mothering were over. I thought that nothing could compare to what was past because a new path hadn't been drawn yet, so I couldn't see Charlotte and Adam and Lucy around the bend waiting for me.

But here they are. And here I am, not just with my youngest child at my side, but with her husband and children, and with my older daughter and her husband and child, and up ahead is my son and his wife who have a baby on the way.

And it's all good, it's all wonderful, this path that I didn't believe in. Not the dead end I anticipated but a whole new world.