She Jumped Off the Cliff
She never asked my permission before so why would she start now?
I remember when my kids were little. I don’t know how many times I thought to myself, “Just wait until they’re grown, life will be easier then.” Then they grew up. Then they moved out. Then they moved on. And, suddenly, a whole new set of problems emerged.
Alarms going unheard and reminders to shower daily became once-a-month phone calls to make sure my boy was still alive. Biting my tongue to avoid an all-out war with my daughter became wishing she was safe just down the hall and her anger at me was all I had to worry about. Still, part of successful parenting is letting go of your children and your expectations for them. That has been an ongoing struggle for several years, but I thought I was seeing progress.
Today, my son is a successful engineer, though maybe he doesn’t keep his house as clean as I would. My daughter is a busy nurse, though she might not live with the same cautionary ways with which she was raised. And, yet, I am so very proud of both of the adults they’ve become, maybe because of (or in spite of) how I raised them. I have learned throughout their 20s to emotionally distance myself from their choices, or at least the ones I don’t agree with, and how to support them without necessarily agreeing with them. Or so I thought…
The pandemic has brought us all new challenges, my adult children being no different. With my oldest, it means he calls more often than he has since he left home almost a decade ago, even several times a week which makes this mama’s heart happy. For my youngest, it means working directly with COVID patients, sheltering in place alone, and trying desperately to figure out where in the world she is meant to be. I’ve heard the pain and struggle in her voice, seen the weariness beyond her years in her young face. I should have known it was coming, after all she is so much like the young woman I was once.
It began several months ago with a conversation about FEMA nursing. She told me she wanted to go where she was needed. I expressed my concerns about her welfare.
“Mom, I’m already on the frontline,” she said nonchalantly. “It’s not like I’m really safe in this ‘new normal’ no matter where I work.”
“But why? Why now?” I whined.
“Because I’m young, I’m healthy, I don’t have kids to leave behind. Someone needs to step up, so why not me? It’s my job to take care of others, to be there for my patients, even if it means personal sacrifice.”
How do you argue with the exact logic you tried so hard to instill in your children? You can’t. Therein lies struggle number one as a parent of adult children. Their choices are not yours. You no longer have the power to ground them or send them to their room to keep them safe. And, in this instance, there is a power struggle between your overwhelming fear for them and raging pride in raising a human that is altruistic in nature and practice.
When the kids were school age, we took a camping trip. Near the site was a series of waterways. One featured a sheer rock face with a long playground slide tacked to the top of the cliff. The kids squealed with delight at the prospect of sailing off into the ether before bottoming out in a murky pool. I was less than thrilled. As a mother, my job was to test the waters before I sent them off to certain death. It took three tries and a kindergartener telling me “either go, lady, or stop getting in line” to take the plunge. When I finally surfaced, I gave my kids the thumbs up. This happened throughout their childhood. Their scaredy-cat mom had to gather up the courage to face down her fear before I could let them live free.
As adults, they don’t give me that luxury. They run headfirst and full speed off the cliff towards danger that would leave me quaking under the covers.
“It’s not your life,” my son once told me gently. “I’m going to do it, but I can just not tell you, if you really want.”
He made his point. I realized that it wasn’t my choice as to how he was going to live his life. The only choice I had was to be part of it or isolate myself out of fear. Not for the first time, the student became the teacher.
FEMA nursing fell out of my conversations with my daughter after telling her of my initial misgivings. Then, one afternoon, she called.
“Hey, Mom. Feel okay?” This is normally code for I’m about to tell you something that is going to stress you.
“Yep, what’s up, kid?”
“I turned in my notice today,” she said and paused. “I’m going to be leaving next month for <insert pandemic epicenter here>. I’ll be working mostly COVID, and in the hardest hit places.”
My head felt like it was full of white noise and storm clouds. I stuttered and then couldn’t say anything. I told her I’d call her back, that I had to go. I sat in the empty dentist’s office and tried not to cry. Here was my little girl, the one with the seizures and sickness who I had to quarantine for the first six weeks of her life. Here was my toddler that almost died and suffered spinal taps and endless IVs when she contracted a serious illness just a few years later. Here was the teenager that walked away one night and didn’t show back up until a few days later, when neither of us had slept or eaten, and fell into my arms in a fit of sobs. Here was my best friend jumping off a cliff with both feet, and I was powerless to stop her.
I called her back that evening and tried to explain how proud I was of her, but also that I didn’t want her to go. She would be working long hours, six days a week, in a strange place. If she got sick, which seemed inevitable, I couldn’t get to her. Who would take care of her while she cared for a bunch of strangers thousands of miles away? But she was resolute. This was where she felt pulled, what she felt in her soul she needed to do. I hung up and cried for my little girl who in that moment had disappeared. This strange woman creature who was brave and selfless, trying to save the world, felt more like a heroine in a story I’d read, not the child I held and loved and let go.
When she was little, she was the first one to sail off the cliff, laughing as she dropped through space and hit the water like a torpedo. She’s still my little rocket, blasting off into the unknown, headfirst and fearless. She will visit me one last time tomorrow. She’ll bring me her houseplants, hug me one more time for the year 2020, and then she will be gone, through the holidays and Pumpkin Spice season, from my hugs and those little visits that mean the world, and won’t be home again for who knows how long. For those of you with teenagers, ready to pull your hair out from quarantining at home with your little darlings, hold them close, even if they squirm and fight, because it doesn’t get any easier when they’re grown.
