Wednesday L turns 16. When we moved here, she was not-quite-eight. My mother died a year and a half later, very unexpectedly. We spent the next several years traveling back up to the area she lived in to deal with disposition of things: property, possessions. In the mix, I think I lost several years to glassed-in grief. Although I thought I was dealing with things quite well, in retrospect, I think I was not quite present. We had spoken every single day, and suddenly there was no one to catch the same ironies, the same jokes that are the substance of the everyday.
It's difficult to be fully present in the best of times; I'm hoping I'm there now.
I'd better be; unexpectedly, someone has a beater to unload, and L is hoping to be able to have a car to drive around. But it's a standard transmission, so she'll need to take some time to learn . . . not to grind those gears.
9 comments:
Happy birthda to L.
Ha!
Me too, I want to be there for my girls...
Happy Birthday to L!
Happy birthday to L, so many family celebrations at this time of year.
happy birthday to l, and continued patience and learning to you - i am sure you both will do just fine...
happy birthday L!
Happy Birthday to L and good luck with the driving lessons! :)
Congratulations both the daughter and the mother, and of course also the father earns congratulations :)
My mother moved to live near us, when my father died and getting her
so close was a wonderful thing. She came every day and was here, when children came from the school and took care of the youngest
until she went to school too.
Mothers have so special part of our whole lives.
Thank you for reminding that!
happy birthday to L! 16, wow. and driving. wow. (yikes?)
i understand that absence/presence thing - it is hard sometimes, but always worth it.
Make sure the birthday girl knows how to drive a manual shift before she takes her driving test.... and make sure she takes the test on the manual car.
My boys took driving lessons at school but only on automatic transmission cars, and all our cars were manual.... no point in having a license if you don't know how to drive the car. So they had to learn manual first....
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