A place of her own - at last

The Boston Herald

BEVERLY BECKHAM

She moved out the way she was born, in the midst of a crisis that overshadowed her. So her leaving was hardly noticed. She left home amid, "What's the prognosis on Gram?" and phone calls and tears.

She slipped into the world pretty much the same way. Then it was her other grandmother who was fighting for her life. She was born quickly, as if she knew there were other things to be done. We have pictures of her older brother and younger sister at their births. But there is not a single photograph of her.

There are no photos of her moving out either. I can't remember the day she left. When she invited us last week to her place for a Father's Day dinner, I thought, just for a second, her place?

I'd been there, of course, but only once and only briefly. I knew she didn't live at home anymore, she hasn't for nearly two months, but I knew it intellectually. I hadn't yet felt her absence. She still came home regularly to see her grandmother and we talked all the time and there were so many other things happening, that I never had time to think about her being gone.

Dinner at her place was a sweet awakening.

When she moved out the first time it was to college. She was just 17 and I wasn't ready to let her go. She was a child still and I hated saying goodbye. I was certain the good-bye would be forever.

People told me, "They come back." But I didn't believe. I cried all the way home from Amherst.

But she did come back, weekends and every few months for vacation and four months every summer. And then she graduated and moved back home and life went on and it was a far better life than I'd ever imagined. A grown daughter is even better than a small daughter, smarter, funnier and just as observant, only about different things.

She'd been looking for an apartment for a long time so when the opportunity came it wasn't a surprise. The place she found was great. Her roommates were great. She started buying things - towels, sheets, a Battenberg lace bedspread, a bed, a bureau. I looked at all the boxes she piled in the family room and thought, who's going to dress me when she leaves? Who's going to tell me when I don't match?

Then the boxes disappeared from the family room. She disappeared. Did she move out on a weekend or a weekday? Did she pack her car all by herself?

I promised I'd buy her a teapot and a coffee pot as housewarming gifts, the second I got to a store, I said, as if we lived in the outback, as if a store were a day's mule ride away. Finally, out of need, she bought these things herself.

"It's OK, Mom," she said. But it didn't feel OK.

Fast forward to Father's Day. There we were walking up the three flights to her apartment, and there I was aware that this was a first time. I had never been invited to dinner at a daughter's house. This was an occasion.

It's a funny thing, being a guest at your daughter's. Funny-nice, funny-special. It's a sweet reversal of roles.

The table was dressed for a party. Steamers boiled on the stove. Lobster waited in the refrigerator. There was a huge salad and corn and bread and wine and fat-free dip.

"It took me all day," she said, incredulous that it did. This celebration was not for me, but it was partly for me, and I was touched by her effort.

I used to think when she was small and I was her whole world, that when she grew up and moved out, my world would be smaller and emptier without her.

What I didn't know, what never occurred to me, is that she would grow up and create a new and different world. And I would get to visit hers and she would get to visit mine and our worlds would be separate, but still revolve around the same things.

And that what we call leaving isn't leaving at all, but growing and evolving, no longer attached, but eternally connected.