My job as a mom has been to bring the kids in. David’s has been to push them out.
This is the order of things. For us anyway.
I was thinking about that day, when we lived in NYC, but we also had that clunky rambling 1980’s house in the rurals of New Paltz. It needed work, so much work. But the kids got to run in the grass naked, and roll down snow banks and trudge through the woods in rainboots and underpants. City kids during the week, country kids on the weekends. David was a rock climber then and the house put us right next to the Gunks. When David painted the house, he used a rock climbing rope system to belay off the front of the house. He was a spectacle in the neighborhood.
One day while David was painting, I walked out the front door and saw him standing at the base of a ladder, holding the bottom of it and looking up into the sky, and I looked too. I saw Lucy at the very top of the ladder. The ladder was propped against the house, two stories up, with Edie right behind her. Lucy was four and Edie was three, all the way up there. Little girls out there in the air on a spindly piece of metal ladder. David was unphased by this.
He shouted confidences at them: You got this. Okay, one more step, a little higher, girls. Good lord, he was encouraging them. This is where it ocurrs to me that one of two things could happen: 1) my children might die or 2) someone was going to call CPS.
Look at us, Mommy!
So I did what any self-respecting mother would do - I walked right back inside and pretended it wasn’t happening so when CPS came, I could take custody of the kids. LOL.
But now.
But now, neither Lucy nor Edie have ever been scared of heights. They, in fact, love heights.
Edie is thinking about being a pilot. They have no fear. David pushed them out into the world, into planes, out on the ocean, up and down mountains. Both girls were months old when they made their first 24 hour flight. He thought nothing of bundling them up and taking them on whatever hard, long adventure he wanted to do himself. He was unphased by crying and complaining. David took them to school on the back of his bike, not a single strap keeping them on that hunk of metal, veering through traffic. He often said things like: If there isn’t any blood, did we really have a good time at the playground?
He wasn’t joking. I married Crocodile Dundee.
The other day, I found Lucy on the street, changing the oil on her motorcycle. It reminded me that my father refused to teach me how to change the oil in my car when I was her age. He didn’t think it was proper. I remebered how much I wanted a mototcycle back then, a Harley Davidson Soft Tail. I never pulled the trigger to make it happen.
I also think about that last visit home to my parents before moving to NYC. They had taken the news of grad school at NYU hard. They didn’t want me to move away from them. Lots of kids from highschool stayed local, it wasn’t uncommon. That last weekend, Dad let me get on the roof of the shed he was building and hammer roof tiles. He called the roof, ruff.
It might have been symbolic, but I wasn’t holding the flashlight for him this time or fetching him ice tea. I was hammering and screwing and nailing and ripping things up. I was on fire. I was dirty. On the ruf of the shed. With my dad. The future full of my own possibility.
Maybe he could see it too? I like to think so. But I had to leave to find myself. They never really understood. My mother never truly recovered from feeling abandoned by my leaving.
My parents would never have let me on the ladder. They struggled mightily with the order of things. I struggled mightily with my fears.
Although I do not identify as a home-maker, in fact, I have always been one.
I mean, I can’t clean for shit, and I hate doing laundry, but I can make a home anywhere. And I do. I am the agoraphobic who might not be able to meet you out there in the real world, but I can draw people in to my habitat. A spider with a cunning, cozy web.
For Lucy and Edie, I was all about bringing them in; parties and sleepovers and weeked cooking and baking sessions with their little feet and faces covered in flour, and letting the kids draw all over me in magic marker, and apartments transformed into haunted houses and egg rolls frying in woks of oil with a classroom of 28 pre-K kids and long drunk evenings with friends around the dinner table, and all our kids crashed out on sofas under half burned-down candles. My kids were naked a lot, and often dirty and the amount of hair brushing we did was questionable, but it was easy enough to be close.
We were messes together.
I am thinking of all of this, because in August, Lucy will be moving out of her casita in the backyard to go college in Salt Lake City, Utah. And shortly after, Edie will go to Munich to au pair for a German family with two daughters, about the same age spread as Edie and Lucy.
How will I be without them? I wondered if their leaving all at once would poummel me as it had my parents?
But I have been with David for 20-ish years and he has changed me, as he changed the girls.
I take some comfort with the order of things now.
By pushing them out into the world, David taught them to push themselves out in the world. And by wrapping them in, I hope I taught them how to make their own comfort, wherever they are and whatever is happening.
This morning, Edie called from Malaga, Spain. She is doing a language intensive program there. She had a lot on her mind and we talked as if she were ponytailed and 10 again, and on the way to contortion practice, in the car, singing Queen songs and talking about everylittlefuckingthing that is going on.
She told me about the meat in Spain and how good it was, her radical discovery LOL and the way she got all her friends to go skinny dipping in the ocean at night, and how the Swedes are different from the Americans, who are different from the Dutch. She went through photos of all the people she met with detailed stories about each of them, brutal in her assessments, so much sarcasm and sass and kindness and wonder and blooming friendship.
And the best part, the sweet I love you, Mommy before she clicks off.
I think about being pregnant with Lucy and having this moment where I was so happy she was inside my belly, contained, tucked away, out of sight, enclosed, protected, because then I could keep her there, completely safe, no one could hurt her. She couldn’t leave me.
The danger would come only when she was pushed out into the world.
But that was its own little lie, wasn’t it? None of us have any real control.
So, I’m just going to be happy, deliriously, soul-saving happy, that Lucy and Edie are pushing out into the world. They are ready. They have been at the top of the ladder, the mountain, the waves, training for it their whole lives.
I refuse to be sad. This is what it has always been about.
The order of things is working. Just as it should.
_______________________
END NOTES:
I’m dedicating this essay to
, brilliant food writer and old friend, who has two girls coming up to this intersection in the road soon. I see you. It will be okay. :)Thank you, as always, for reading. Kim xo
I wish every parent had your ability to see and support their daughters as fully formed human beings the way you do. Reminds me of the song "PROTECTOR" by Beyonce - "Even though I know, someday, you're gonna shine on your own // I will be your projector" Sending love from SF, please come here for a talk someday!
Gosh Kim, I've watched your babies grow up over the internet, through blogging about them wearing underpants on their heads, FB pictures, IG stories, the multitude of meals you've made that I wish I was there with you at your kitchen table digging in with everyone, through their adventures, the additional family members, the mental breakdown, everything. I feel like I know them even though we've never even met. And they are amazing and will be even more so from the foundation they've been given. What a blessing it's been to watch their lives unfold. From my own experience, watching your child excel in the world with the gifts you've bestowed on them is such an immense joy. Thank you for sharing your family with us. XO