Goodbye to my grown, college girl

At dawn, on the last August morning in our house before my youngest re-homes herself as a college freshman, I stand in her bedroom doorway. I’m headed to work as I’ve done for so many years of her childhood, tugged by the many ways and masters that have hewn my one-parent solo-income life together: to editors and deadlines and the small-town selectboard who now pay me weekly to keep their town running and, in return, my own home afloat.

My daughter sleeps catlike on her belly as I slept, pre-pregnancy—a habit I never regained. Cornsilk hair drapes her face save for her lips. In two hours, she’ll head to work, too, cashiering in a general store in a Vermont summer resort town, earning an education far better than what her struggling rural high school could provide. She sells beer and cheese, sandwiches and chips, to the vacationing ultra wealthy and the lower class who tend their gardens and wash their bedsheets. One evening, eating tacos, she told me, “When I have a job with a pantsuit, I’ll never be rude to cashiers if I’m stupid enough to break a dozen eggs. I’ll pay for what I broke. I’ll be one of the decent people.”

One pearly foot faces me. How much I want to settle on her rumpled bed and clasp that ankle in my hand. Gentle. For years, I had unfettered reign to her little, knobby shoulders, the tendrils of curls at the nape of her plush neck. Even as a newborn, her skin was lightly cross-hatched in that tender place. She was so tiny I could cuddle all of her on my lap, breathing in her sweet, never-sour smell of milk that lingered for years after we had ceased what she happily called “nursies.”

We live in a clapboard house built a hundred years ago by strangers on a sandy moraine that the last ice age sculpted, about 450 million years ago, give or take a few thousand years. So what’s eighteen years of parenting? Such a long, hard, beloved row.

Watching her sleep on the secondhand mattress on the bed slats that keep falling out, I want so many things for this girl on the brink of young womanhood: a college education, a meaningful work life, friends, longevity. Whatever version of marriage she prefers. Warmth in bitter nights. The shelter of love. A few weeks ago, her father’s property was auctioned at a tax sale. Now, nearing sixty, he’s disappeared from Vermont, headed to Burning Man, new adventures, his bygone youth. We rarely speak of him, this void he left that we’ve built our lives around.

I leave her door ajar so our tabby cats might wander in and out, doing their feline things: sniffing and purring and meditating. When she was three, this girl stepped on a wild blackberry cane. A thorn pierced her pink crocs. I sat down on a fallen log, cradled her in my lap and pulled that long thorn from her heel, its fierce tip wet with her blood. Her sister fed her plump berries and tickled her so she would laugh.

I’d packed up my two daughters and my house, six years before this morning, left their father, whose mind I’d ceased to understand, and re-homed us in a different town, a new life. Through her two windows with the view of the narrow Black River valley and the scrappy village, the sunlight rushes in, golden, with just the right amount of August warmth. At night, starlight touches her face.

I don’t believe in stillness or plateaus. There is no “making it,” no cease of parenting, of growing, of life. It’s all change, metamorphosis, evolution, from zygote to burial. I take this moment, however, and pause, imprinting those two windows, the sunlight, her swirled hair, the curve of her arch, into my memory for my own keepsake.

I restrain myself from waking my daughter from that good hard rest of youth by kissing her sole and sobbing. Pitifully. I leave the door half-open and head into my working day, leaving my daughter in dreamland. She’ll have plenty of steps ahead of her.