It started out a typical
breakfast, on a sunny New Year's eve morning
with a friend.
Each of us a mother
Each of us with a daughter.
She needed to talk about her days and ways with this daughter...
and I needed to listen.
We laughed at the typical-ness of nearly 20 year's old daughters...
the way they...
don't like their mothers...
the way they INSIST
they will NEVER be like their mothers!
We each shared how our mother's told us not to "take it so personal" and we
each laughed and nodded about how IMPOSSIBLE this was...
because...
weren't our daughters PERSONAL for goodness sake. Who could be more personal than a daughter...whom you carried in your arms, gave a life to, prayed for, worried about, made mistakes over, suffered through, joyed at and so forth and so on...
Our daughters...the most personal of all persons!
And then I began to cry...big tears rolling down the inside of my mind...
I tried to stop them, but the tears kept coming and soon...
it was too late...
out the tears came...drenching my eyelashes...mascara cirles wreathing the hollows of my eyes...and
she looked at me...embarrassed...
and I was embarrassed...
because this was her moment in time to share with me about her daughter...in this present place.
So I stanched the tears with the bottom of my blouse...(neither one of us from a generaton who carried kleenex...)
And since my little moment had passed...we began to talk again about how much our daughters were alike...
But by then...it all came back to me as it does every hour since July 25th, 2004...
that the biggest difference in our daughters was the reason for my tears...my daughter doesn't live here anymore.
She lives in a somewhere that I can not visit, can not talk to her, can not view...
My friend, thankfully...does not know how blessed she is...I am glad she can not know it. I am glad her reality is the way it is...because it means...her daughter is still here...
with her.
And I am happy for her.
Just a little chit chat...
girl talk...
on a New Year's eve morning...
over a little breakfast...
and here I am back at home...writing my tears...
once again.
Read more articles by Kim Sandstrom or search for articles on the same topic or others.
Kim this is excellent as always..I particularly liked the description of the mascara circles. I somehow wished your MC had been able to share her pain with the friend who still has her daughter. We all need to be comforted at times.
