Not a Perfect Daughter, and Yet--

Contemplating the later-in-life mother-daughter relationship.

A couple of Scorpios, our birthdays are four days apart.

Hi beautiful friends,

My mom came to stay with me from Arizona over Christmas and New Year’s. She’s 89, is the lightest packer you’ll ever meet, and only recently started to check her luggage. She’s still married to my dad, who’s 96, but for the last three-plus years they’ve been living separately. My dad is blind and has dementia, and now resides in an adult family home about five minutes away from his Sweetheart of 60 years.

My mom is a sweet-tart of a sweetheart: fiercely opinionated; instead of baking cookies for us as kids, she took us to watch sunsets and would belt out, “have you ever seen anything so goddamn beautiful!?, which embarrassed us at the time, but she was right. This woman is also strong as hell, and has been adjusting to living by herself—during a pandemic no less.

It doesn’t snow a lot where I live (a Seattle suburb). But it came down, and hard, the day after Christmas and didn’t stop until we had a good seven inches, then stuck around for a week. There were some brilliant sunny days, and cold ones. We bundled up and walked arm-in-arm through the trails of the local park, everything draped in sparkling blankets of crystal white, hearing the crunch-crunch beneath our boots, and stopping to watch the birds darting overhead.

My mom and I are like opposing reflections of each other: My mom never had a mom (hers died giving her birth), and I never had kids. So we have:

One mother who doesn’t know what it’s like to be mothered, and one daughter who doesn’t know what it’s like to mother.

(She is also blonde with blue eyes; I am brunette with hazel eyes, and yet some people think we look strikingly alike.)

Our contrasts and similarities have made for some lively times over the years—like many mother-daughter relationships. We’ve traveled, gone to a lot of artsy-fartsy events, and skinny-dipped in lakes that weren’t really private enough to warrant naked dips. My mom made experiences a priority over things, and was my early Beauty Mentor as well.

There was a time when I was in my late-30s and an anger came out of me like lava flowing from a volcano. That was what I call my Angry Daughter phase, something I should have/could have gone through at, say, 15 or 16 years old like most healthy-angry daughters but I’m a late bloomer so there you have it.

You know what’s beautiful? Hanging in there with someone you love and who loves you even when you feel anything but love for the person, while they go through a monster-y, resentful phase in life.

You know something else? I can still be impatient, short-tempered, and intolerant. With myself, with my husband, with talking heads on the TV screen, or a person down the street who let their dog jump all over my new white pants— and also, worst of all, with my 89-year-old mother who is grieving the slow-motion loss of her husband.

During the nine days my mom was here, I had my regular flares of aggravation and impatience, but this time there was something new in the mix: Love. I could feel this great love in the brew of irritation. I could imagine both snapping at her and embracing her in a vast love. I both wanted to yell at my mom, and inhale her as if I was Love incarnate. Because I am more accustomed to snapping, I did that. And later, when I felt more grounded, I hugged and loved.

On the last morning, while she stood at the front door with her bags, she gave me an envelope with a note scrawled on a piece of paper.

Love you my perfect daughter.

Look at the torn edge, the unremarkable presentation and all. I love it.

I love that she made me her perfect daughter even though I have my moments of imperfection that are clear to both of us. I am her perfect daughter. I am perfectly my daughterly self, just as we all are. I, you, she, they—all of us having daughterly moments with what is available to us at the moment.

The daughter who has never had a daughter; the mother who was never mothered. How perfect is it that we have been able to walk together for almost six decades.

Here is one of the many photos I took during our outings. It strikes me how much this captures where we are going. Me making mischief on the path, and my mom walking, walking until she is out of sight, until I will be here without her.