First Flight

photo credit qthomasbower

I wait near the gate until she boards. Tall, lanky, her dark blonde hair pulled tight against her head into a ponytail that cascades and expands as it sways against her back. Her hair suits her, sleek and smart with an untamed streak. Clever, aware, she carries herself with the wisdom of having grown up in New York City. A daughter to be proud of, a daughter born of a mother's fearsome wish that she be better, better always than me.  

I watch her walk, a bounce in her gait I am as familiar with as I might be a lover, as I am her father. I ache after her departure in the way I once ached after her father, my husband, my lover. But different too, for this is the longing of a mother, the ache of a piece missing. A piece I cared for, nourished, nurtured both in and outside myself. A piece of myself I must surrender to this wayward world.  

Love, romantic love is the stuff of completion, a love of fulfillment, of recognition, of a common self. Looking together in the same direction. Romantic love is a needing love, a longing. This love, the mother's love is a giving love, a love of responsibility, protection and guidance. Mother love is an offering, my life for yours, always slightly unbalanced. Romantic love, good, lasting, martial love finds that balance. Mother/child love is an endless push/pull dance of need and desire, autonomy and clinging, clutching and shoving off, and trying always to discern which to do when.

And so I let her go.  Straight into the arms of my own mother, a safer place I do not know.  Whatever my own childlike objections to my own upbringing (and they are both many and complex) still and always my mother is a safe space, a woman I would trust with my life, am trusting with this life my husband and I created.  A life we are letting become its own.