Letting go: The toughest job
/The Boston Herald
February 25, 1992
BEVERLY BECKHAM
I embarrassed her the other evening. I didn't mean to. The problem with me is that I look at her and see a child, a little girl, although she is 15 now and hardly a little girl at all.
I walk into a restaurant and there she is, somewhere I don't expect her to be and I give her the third-degree. I say she should have phoned and told me where she was going. I say I don't want her in a car with a driver I don't know. I overreact. I behave like my mother.
She reminds me later that she is growing up, that I have to let go, but I'm having a hard time doing this.
"How about if I get a pizza and rent a movie tonight?" I'll say on a Friday afternoon.
"Mom, I'm 15," she'll answer. "Don't take it personally, but I'm going to the movies with my friends."
"But you went out with them last Friday," I'll argue.
"That's what people do on Friday nights, Mom. Don't you remember?"
I did remember with my other children. I honestly did. I saw them getting older. I noted it. I remarked on it. I delighted in it. I never wanted to follow them everywhere they went.
But with this one, I'm stuck in the Twilight Zone. In my eyes, she's still 12. In my eyes, she's still a baby.
It's a fun-house mirror thing, perception. When I was 15, I knew I was mature and responsible. But my mother considered me a child. I didn't understand how she could be so unseeing.
I remember a particular day when she picked me up from school and I was late - I'd had to stay after - so she'd been watching kids pour out the doors, for 10 maybe 15 minutes. When I got in the car, she turned to me and said, "They all look like babies."
I looked out the window and saw Chuck Hibbett, who needed a shave, and Jimmy Fitzgerald, who was more than six feet tall, and thought: Like babies? How could she say this? These were juniors and seniors. My mother was clearly insane. I vowed right then that I would never forget how adult 15 really was.
And yet here I am, my mother. I go to a gymnastics meet and watch high school kids and think, they're babies. I sit in the parking lot and see them straggle out after a dance and think, they're children. I have developed cataracts on my mind's eye. Glaucoma has narrowed my view. I have forgotten what I vowed I'd never forget.
Last week the truth flashed in front of me a little. We were on our way to Nantasket, the 15-year-old and her 14-year-old best friend, when I happened to mention that when I was 15 I rode my bike all the way from Randolph to Nantasket with my 14-year-old friend.
The statement blew open a Pandora's Box.
"Why don't you tell Carla the whole story, Mom, about how your mother told you not to ride your bike anywhere. About how she trusted you. About how you abused that trust."
I was allowed to ride my bike across the street and around the block. That was it. I tried reasoning with my mother. I'd be getting my driver's license in a year. I tried begging.
But my mother was adamant, I believed because she was mean. But it was because I was her baby that she set limits, and because she was afraid.
"Her parents went away for two days and she rode her bike to Nantasket one day and to Somerville the next," my daughter announced in a tone that said, and-she-worries-about me.
And I realized then why I do worry, why I am so reluctant to let her go. Because I am afraid, too, not just of what the world can do to her, but of what it will do to us. Like her brother and sister before her, she will meet people I don't know, ride in cars with drivers I've never met. She will learn, she will grow, she will blossom and one day she will be gone.
Independence, after all, is the goal. You spend a lifetime co-depending, giving, sharing, guiding, listening, encouraging, and they grow up and they leave.
It's normal. And it's not even that terrible. Except when it's your baby standing on the brink.
Then sometimes you cling.
