A birthday not celebrated

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A birthday not celebrated

Today is her birthday. She would have been 10. At school they would have sung to her. At home there would have been presents and cake and a party. But she died in June so there is no celebration. In the house not far from Wollaston Beach where Leanne lived with her mother and grandparents, though there are photos of her smiling on the walls and shelves, there are few real smiles anymore. Her absence fills the place. There are no feet pounding up the stairs. No books flung on a chair. No "Mama! Nana! I'm home!" Two women who loved and raised a child are empty without her. They try to put into words their loss, their love and their pain. But words can't hold these things and so as they speak, tears fall…

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Letting go doesn't get any easier the third time around

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The youngest just got her driver's license. Another day. Another benchmark. They come so regularly lately that I have trouble keeping up with them. The oldest graduated and moved to Florida. Then the middle one turned 21. Then the youngest turned 16 and got her driver's permit. Then the middle one graduated and moved home. Now there is this. The birds have grown up and have all flown away…

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High heels, hairdos and dates will never take away `my baby'

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High heels, hairdos and dates will never take away `my baby'

NEW YORK - I still call her "my baby," and she puts up with this and with me, with an understanding that goes beyond her 16 1/2 years. She allows me this indulgence, this solitary pretense, though we both know she isn't a baby anymore.

The knowledge for her is old. But for me, it's new. I have seen her through such myopic eyes. Even dressed up for a formal dance, she has seemed to me just a little girl pretending. All of the outward signs - her learning to drive, her staunch independence, the bedroom door closed while she talks on the phone for hours, the calls from boys, the flowers, the whispers, the cogent arguments about right and wrong, good and bad, the talks about college, about careers, about the rest of her life - should have alerted me to the truth.

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Daughter's `new' clothes show '70s fashions are right on

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Daughter's `new' clothes show '70s fashions are right on

The 21-year-old keeps appearing at my office door in clothes I know I threw away two decades ago.

"What do you think, Mom? Don't you just love this outfit?"

This "outfit," the one she's modeling now, is the worst of the lot. It's a black-and-white polka-dot-one-piece, who-knows-what-to-call it.

"It's three different fashions in one," she explains. "It's a bell-bottom jumpsuit with an empire waist and a halter-top front. Remember those halter tops you used to wear?"

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Neatness doesn't count when your room is full of memories

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She is upstairs cleaning her room, the 21-year-old. The new college graduate is out, out, damn spotting childhood and adolescence to make way for the working woman she has become.

Necessity has forced her to do this. She can't fit what she brought home, what she has collected in the past four years, in a room that is a storehouse for her first 17.

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He gives a gift of confidence

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I am sitting in the car, in the passenger seat. My daughter, the 16-year-old, is behind the wheel. She is learning to drive, and I am teaching her, telling her when to speed up, to slow down, to move a little to the left, to be careful of the ice on the road.

I hardly breathe while she drives. I keep my foot poised on an invisible brake. I see a child next to me, a little girl far too young to be driving a car.

My hands are fists as we travel down Dedham Street.

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Education: The great divide

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It's the first capitulation. Totally understandable. Maybe even warranted. But it's a surrender, nonetheless, of ideals and perhaps even goals.

President-elect Bill Clinton has decided to send his only child, Chelsea, to private school. Who can blame him? Who, in his position, wouldn't do the same? He is the president. She is his daughter. Why shouldn't she have the best?

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A miracle that came too late

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A miracle that came too late

My friend Anne's daughter died of cystic fibrosis eight-and-a-half years ago. Amy was 11, in the sixth grade, and my daughter Lauren's best friend. We knew Amy was going to die, everyone knew, but we knew it intellectually the way we know that someday we'll grow old, and someday babies not even born yet will have gray hair. We didn't believe it, couldn't imagine it. Someday was theory. Amy's death was an eternity away…

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`Rabbit' means `Don't leave'

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Today is rabbit day.

"Rabbit," I say to my husband before getting out of bed.

"Rabbit," he answers automatically.

"Rabbit," I whisper to my 15-year-old before I go downstairs.

"Rabbit," she mumbles, and returns to sleep.

"Rabbit," I repeat to the 20-year-old asleep on the family room couch. She groans, mutters "rabbit," and puts a pillow over her head.

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Crash survivor is living proof that seat belts save lives

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"19-year-old survives car crash" the headlines should have read, because his not dying miraculous. But it wasn't news. Surviving never is. People walk away from car crashes every day.

But Erickson shouldn't have. He fell asleep at the wheel while driving home from Boston on the VFW Parkway. His Toyota pickup truck careened over an embankment, ploughed into trees, spun around and landed back on the park-way facing the wrong direction. The truck is history. Erickson survived without a scratch.

People say he was lucky. But he was more than lucky. He was smart. He was wearing a seat belt. The seat belt saved his life.

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Mother, daughter gap wide

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"All we do is argue," the woman tells me over a cup of coffee. Her 16-year-old daughter has just stormed out the front door ("I'm going for a walk.") because her mother suggested in front of "company" that she might want to shut off the TV and go upstairs and clean her room.

"I didn't yell at her," the mother says. "I was simply making a suggestion.

"My daughter and I are like oil and water these days. I tell myself to be calm and patient and understanding. I try to remember how I felt when I was her age. I know I was a slob, too. But it isn't just her room we fight about. It's everything. She looks at me like I'm a fly on her dinner plate. She sighs every time I try to talk to her. She shuts herself in her room and talks on the phone for hours, and I can hear her up there laughing and giggling and having a great time. Then she hangs up and comes downstairs and thumps around here like she's in prison and I'm the guard.

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Letting go: The toughest job

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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.

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Adoption meant life

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Adoption meant life

She is 17 and beautiful, not just on the outside, with her dark hair and Snow White complexion and her perfect teeth, which never needed braces; but on the inside where it counts.

She has always been beautiful: interested in other people, careful about their feelings, warm, considerate, a smiling, sweet, loving, gentle, wonderful girl.

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Kids have us over a barrel

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In the middle of exams she called from school to tell me that I am the only mother she knows who didn't send a survival package to her overworked, over-stressed, over-programmed daughter, that I am the only mother who never sends packages.

Why don't I bake brownies and rush with them to the post office, she demanded to know. Why don't I stock up on candy and granola bars and Advil and Nyquil and wrap them in tissue and pack them in a box and send them air mail, special delivery to the away-from-home daughter I say I love.

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The case of the missing clicker

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The TV clicker is missing. It vanished 10 days ago somewhere between 7 p.m. and 8:15 p.m.. The 14-year-old had it last. This is fact. It was in my hand and she stole it from me. "Give me that," she said, grabbing the remote control before I could. I had mistakenly changed the station instead of turning up the volume during a riveting scene of "Life Goes On." The entire family yelped. "I can't believe you still don't know how to use this thing," my daughter said.

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So if you were on an island...

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When she was little she clung to me and said, "You're my best friend in the whole wide world." She used to cry when I went away, for a night, for a weekend. "Why can't you take me?" she would ask. And I would explain, "Because this party is for grown-ups. Because this is a business trip. Because you'd be bored." "No I wouldn't, Mommy. I'd never be bored around you."

Such absolute, unconditional love.

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