Saying goodbye to childhood

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

This is basic housekeeping, nothing more. So why does it feel like more?

I take the trophies off my daughter's bookshelf, earned in dance and gymnastics and softball, and wrap them in newspaper and put them in a box and write on the box in Magic Marker, "Julie's trophies." Then I do the same with the plaques on her wall and the dolls on her dresser and the stuffed animals on her bed and her schoolbooks and notebooks and photographs and Disney figurines.

I am cleaning out my youngest daughter's room, packing away her things because it is time. She doesn't live here anymore. I am converting her bedroom into a sitting room, taking down her posters and repainting the walls, emptying her bureau and desk drawers of all her childhood things to make room for new things.

My daughter has not lived in her room for more than two years. She has not sat at her desk in at least twice that long. Her bureau is full of clothes she had in high school. When she visits, she sleeps in her sister's old room because she says that bed is more comfortable.

Of course it is. Her bed was bought for a little kid, which she was the summer we found it. It was the summer she did cartwheels everywhere, up and down the beach in Maine, in the aisles at the supermarket, on the soccer field, on the front lawn, off every diving board, in parking lots though I told her not to. Her feet were pointed skyward, her hands were splayed on whatever flat surface there was and she was just as likely to be found upside down as right side up. I used to think she would cartwheel her way through life. I hoped she would. But the cartwheels stopped just as suddenly as they began and it was on to the next phase of growing up.

When she went off to college, I closed the door to her bedroom and left her things exactly as they were because I knew she would be coming back. It was just school. Her home was still her home, her room still her room though each time she returned home she was a little older and a little more independent. Still, her room remained the same, which made that it easier for me to pretend she was the same, too.

In the beginning she was home not only for holidays but for entire summers, which made me think that at the end of this great adventure, I might get her back again. Silly me. I knew in my head that it was over the second it began. But my heart refused to accept this.

I get her back now only for visits now or stopovers on her way to or from someplace else. And I get to visit her. This is all normal. She is a grownup, and I am too.

The play that ran for so many years down the hall, behind her bedroom door, has been over for a long while. The actor has gone on to other parts. Even the audience is somewhere else. Everyone is gone - everyone, except me.

Because for as long as the set remained the same, for as long as my daughter's American flag hung over her bed and her books filled her shelves and her clothes filled her drawers, I could continue to hope for an encore.

My father says that what I'm doing is more than housekeeping and that he knows how I feel because he's been there.

"How do you think I felt when you left home?" he says. "You feel sad now. Of course you do. It's hard, packing away her things and reliving all those good times. But I guarantee you that in a week, maybe two, you'll walk into that nice clean room and smile. Think about it. That room is actually going to stay clean."

My father makes me laugh. And then he lets me cry.

It helps that he understands.