I have been dreading this moment.
I am sitting in a room full of metal folding chairs. The kind that protest loudly when you open
them, and when not open, they lay stacked at the back of the church basement in
precarious heaps. You touch one and they
all slide down, like an avalanche.
There is a sign hanging over the stage, Congratulations! Each letter is a separate piece of glittering
cardboard. It is the only thing festive
about the room.
No, that’s not true, because now the room is filing up with
mothers and fathers and siblings and aunts of the preschoolers who are about to
graduate. They are dressed in their best
and brightest clothes. They come from
all over, South of the United States.
Mexico, Columbia, Guatemala, Venezuela.
The room is filled with color and rapid fire Spanish, punctuated by
shrieks of recognition followed by “Hola!
Como estas?” Everyone here knows
each other.
Except me. I am
sitting on top of a sheet of paper on which my mother has written Reserved.
I am loaded down with three recording devices—an iPad, and iPhone
and my mother’s camera, because she doesn’t trust the first two. She has a healthy suspicion of
technology.
She has charged me with the task of making sure no one
stands in the aisles, which I am not doing.
Instead I am smiling politely at everyone and fiddling with the
cameras.
My father comes and sits down next to me.
“Dad!” I exclaim.
When we last spoke, he was on Cape Cod.
He told me the weather had been “just awful.” Rainy and cold. It can be like that on the Cape in the
summer. Some years, we had to break out
our winter jackets. “If this keeps up,
I’m coming home.” I told him if he did,
that he should try to make it to the graduation.
And here he was. He
sat down in the chair next to me. On
another Reserved sheet of paper.
“So the weather never cleared up, huh?” I say.
“No, it got beautiful just before I left.” He told me, sighing and handing me a box of
fudge and a smaller bag for Sophie. He
drapes his arms around my shoulders.
Mom enters the room.
She’s anxious. I can tell by the
tension in her face. She gets anxious
every year. Even though, no matter what
they do, three- and four-year-olds on stage are impossibly cute. She is shushing the kids, who are lined up in
the hallway, in a stage whisper that reaches over the low murmur of the
parents.
“Hit it, Maestro,” my mom tells Ms. Ruth, who was the aide
when I went to my mother’s school, 39 years ago. The first few notes of “Trot, My Pony, Trot”
fill the room as the children gallop in on homemade hobby horses.
There is a lump in my throat and tears form around the edges
of my eyes. This is it.
My mother has already told her teachers that I am going to
be hysterical. I know she thinks that
the kids will have to project their tiny voices above my first-row wails. So, I am determined not to cry. I want to enjoy this, not watch it through
tear-streaked eyes.
The best thing to do is to not perseverate on the fact that
today marks the end of my weekly trips up to my mother’s. It marks the end of packing our bags every
Monday night. Stashing a bag full of new
library books in the front seat that I can pass back, one-by-one to Sophie over
the course of our two-hour drive. It
marks the end of working in a room adjacent to my daughter’s classroom, and
being able to pop in and see what she has made, read to the class, or help my
mother with the computer that she is unable to make bend to her will. The
nights of staying at my mother’s house, eating egg salad for dinner, their
standoffish cats slipping in and out of our rooms as we sleep, are over.
But the thing I am trying to avoid thinking about the most
as the children silently sign “The More We Get Together, The Happier We’ll Be,”
and then belt out “Todos Los Amigos Estan Aqui” is all the people we will no
longer see—my family, my friends, mom's staff. Not on
a regular basis, anyhow.
And as much as I have tried to avoid taking these
relationships for granted—the certainty of their presence in my and Sophie’s
life—when faced with their yawning absence I feel light pangs of regret. How will I maintain these deep connections,
for me and for Sophie? How can I avoid our
love being pulled and stretched thin across this new distance?
I think about my own intrepid mother, who drove us into the
Bronx every weekend to see her own mother.
After a lunch of tuna salad and lettuce leaves dripping with corn oil
and Spike, they would gossip about family members my sister and I did not
know. We would sneak off into the
bedroom that was once my mothers, find her childhood Ginny dolls, and
carelessly break them. Or we would sit
at my grandmother’s desk, drawing on the backs of the Parents magazine order forms that my
grandmother sold door-to-door. It was
both comfortable and boring, and a ritual I missed terribly once Alzheimer’s eroded my grandmother’s memory.
I am in a gap between rituals. Feeling acutely this loss of a precious
period in my life. Wondering what the
memory and significance of it will hold for Sophia. Longing to find a satisfying, easy way to
hold everyone close, to stave off separation.
It is the final act.
“Nice and loud,” I whisper to Sophia, as she takes a seat in one of the
metal chairs set facing the audience.
She swings her legs with eager energy as the rest of the class takes
the stage.
“Nice and loud,” my mother whispers in her ear as she hands
Sophie a well-worn copy of Brown Bear,
Brown Bear.
With great confidence, Sophia pulls herself up in her chair,
faces everyone, and announces, “Our children’s preschool is going to put on a
play called Brown Bear Brown Bear What Do
You See.”
And then her voice fills the room, escaping through the
windows and spreading to the world all around.
I watch her with dry eyes and a swollen heart.
She is ready to move on.
I wish this were true for me too. Days later, I am grateful to be alone in the
house. So no one can hear how
loud I’m sobbing, or how pinched and red my face become from crying over loss
and grief.
1 comment:
Dear Melissa, I just finished reading "Moving On. Minette handed me the tissue box as I read the last line. You will never be far away because I keep you both in my heart all thr time. It's abittersweet time for me too but we will work to keep the love alive. After all I will always be YOUR MOTHER!
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