Knowing your daughter

For our next big vacation together, Mary and I have a trip planned during which we’ll be spending time in Daughter One’s neck of the woods. We’re going to stay in a condo in her apartment complex and  we'll see her at work. We’ll visit with theGayBoysandEllie and at least once, Mary and Two will go shopping with her on her home turf. Okay, maybe more than once – I’ll catch up on some neglected reading. And writing. We’ll have a big Mom dinner with One’s best buds (ham and cheesy potatoes, doncha know – mebbe a pie) and we’ll talk about how things are going and how they should go.

After a week in Orlando and another in Venice (Florida, not Italy – we’re paying for our second college education) we will have a much better idea of how our daughter’s life in Florida is shaping up. But flying home, we still won’t actually have much of an idea what her life is like. The thing is, you can’t ever really know another person’s life because the whole ‘walking in another’s moccasins’ thing is a nice thought but can’t be done. Not really. Especially not if the ‘other’ to which we refer is a person whose diapers you once changed. Diaper changing and nose wiping are acts of love but they erect a barrier between wiper and wipee.

You child will always be your child. But the adult she’ll become needs to become someone else entirely. The echoes of the little girl will always be there and if you’re lucky, you’ll always be welcome to revisit that world with her, to the extent that memory and intervening experiences allow. But as hard as you try, you can never know the woman as well as you knew the little girl.

That’s just the way it is.