This morning I awoke when it was still dark and held my watch up to my face. It was 6:07am. As soon as I saw the time, it hit me: exactly thirty years ago I was lying in a hospital with my newborn daughter in my arms. Technically, she might have been in my mom’s arms or her father’s. We were all there for her earthly debut. She was born at 5:26am, and I can assure you that no matter who had actual possession forty-one minutes later, all three of us were permanently smitten.
My daughter Molly turned thirty today. If you are a parent, you know that your child’s milestone birthdays feel every bit as important as your own. I used to roll my eyes when my mom would say things like, “I just can’t believe my baby is thirty!” But, yeah, I get it now, mom. I just can’t believe my baby is thirty.
My daughter is an extraordinary human and has been so since that morning we first met her. Beginning when she was around four or five, she used to direct her dad and me in a game we all called, “That Little Girl.” We played it for years. Its basic premise was this: the three of us would be together somewhere — a park, Disneyland, a supermarket, even just the front yard — and Molly would suddenly distance herself from us and take on an aloof air. The game had begun; we knew what to do.
One of us would loudly say to the other, “Hey, look, it’s That Little Girl!” Although we would actively notice her, she would continue being elusive. We would have to work for her attention. “Excuse us, Little Girl, excuse us!” we would say. Molly would glance at us sideways, acknowledging us by the lift of a tiny ginger eyebrow, “Yes?” “Why are you here all by yourself? Where are your parents?” Molly would shrug sadly, “I don’t have parents.” At which point Jack and I would look at each other with exaggerated shock and awe. “YOU DON’T HAVE PARENTS?” Molly would drop her head and shake it slowly, mournfully. “Well,” one of us would venture, “can we be your parents?” At this point Molly would finally deign to look at us full in the face, seemingly assessing our visible strengths and weaknesses as potential parents. Inevitably, she would agree that we could, in fact, be her parents. And then we’d just finish our walk through the park, ride the teacups, do our shopping, or continue trimming the roses as a complete family. Molly would not be taken for granted, even at age four.
In fifth grade Molly bought a pair of fashion glasses at Claire’s and began to wear them every day. Like, religiously. She would not leave the house without them, and before long nobody but us knew they were bullshit glasses. The next time I saw her school record it actually said, in her official file, “Must wear corrective lenses.” At the end of the school year, she ditched the glasses as suddenly as she had adopted them. It was like a weird game of catch and release with everyone at her school and I was totally impressed by her flex, if a little baffled. I sometimes think she just needed to make it clear to the world that she was writing the script.
My little scriptwriter put me through my paces when she was a teenager, a phase I now euphemistically describe as “Molly breaking out of her chrysalis.” Navigating Molly’s adolescence was, in some ways, harder than navigating my own. I felt a little like Cassandra, cursed with foreseeing the traps my daughter would fall into — I fell into them too — yet unable to make her believe that I knew where they lay. In hindsight I wish I hadn’t tried so hard to protect her from life’s inevitable lessons. I wish I’d been better at just being there for her, not so determined to control that little force of nature.
The fact is, it’s hard for me to pinpoint all the things I admire about my daughter. Parental love is so big and complex it defies articulation. I know for a fact her father feels the same. There are times when I’ll call her dad and our stimulating conversation goes something like this:
Jack: Hello?
Me: Hi, it’s me. Everything is fine. It’s just…(pause as I choke back all the feels)… Molly!
Jack: I know…(pause as he chokes back all the feels)…she’s so wonderful.
Me: She is!
Jack: I love her so much.
Me: Me, too!
(long pause as we both choke back all the feels)
Me: Okay, it was good talking to you.
Jack: You, too, take care, Kathleen.
Please note that Jack and I have normal-sized vocabularies and I like to think our theatrical background gives us an edge in verbal fluency. We have plenty to say if we are talking about films, plays, or cats. But when it comes to our kid? She literally stuns us. She had this effect on my mom, too.
My mom no longer walks with us here on the earthly plane. She’s been gone more than nine years now, which is kind of shocking to write down. Despite the significant obstacle of dying too damn early, she still plays a big role in her granddaughter’s life. A lucid dreamer, Molly hangs out with mom in dreamland sometimes. I love to get those early morning calls or texts that begin with, “I was with GG last night!” Mom is conjured in so many waking moments, too. Molly will tell me she met someone with “GG vibes” and no further explanation is needed. It delights me, all these unconscious and conscious moments where my mom is invoked for my daughter.
Sometimes Molly goes looking for my mom. I do that, too, though we look for her in different places. Molly will make the drive to Half Moon Bay and roam my mom’s favorite beaches by herself, though she is not at all by herself on these walks. Molly writes gorgeous stories from mom’s point of view, and they feel so scarily authentic I can’t help but wonder if my daughter is channeling her GG in ways that I cannot fathom. They had an indelible bond that belonged only to them. I do know that whenever I’m with Molly, I feel my mom’s presence in a powerful way that I can’t untangle and don’t quite want to.
A few weeks back I unearthed a small collection of my mom’s writings. I was searching my email folders for something banal when up popped an old message from Vinogal209, my mom’s email handle. I must have sent them to myself from my mom’s computer shortly after she died, or else my brother sent them to me. We both had my mom’s passwords back then, so we could deal with all the clerical tasks that keep you busy — and in a weird way keep you sane — when you lose a loved one.
I have a lot of my mom’s writings, and not just things purloined from her hard drive. My mom loved to write and she sent long, conversational letters throughout her life. I still have the letters she wrote when I went away to horse camp in seventh grade; I was just 13 miles away, and gone only a week, and yet I suffered Odysseus-level homesickness. Her letters took my mind off my misery; they were cheerful and newsy, full of little reports on what everyone was doing in my absence, including each of our pets. I have thick bundles of letters she wrote me during my brief residencies in London, Seattle, and Dublin, too. But to unexpectedly find new material is still a special joy.
One of the documents in this recently unearthed Vinogal209 collection was titled “January 4 Molly.” It was a letter to Molly, and my best guess is mom wrote it in 2017, a few months before she died. My mom was writing a lot before she died, an assortment of pieces incorporating prompts from her Unitarian writing group, reflective journaling, and distinctly end-of-the-road messages to those of us she loved. Her January 4 letter to Molly was an extended and heartfelt declaration of love. I am going to be careful with what I share because the letter wasn’t intended for me. But because the letter was for Molly and this post is for Molly, I’m sharing this small excerpt:
All my other grandchildren were Michael’s or Richard’s, and all the mothers of those children made it as hard as possible to continue seeing them. I think the only connection was that I would buy the children clothes or toys or whatever and take them off the mother’s hands for a short time.
I was waiting for you to come along. I knew Kathleen would never keep a grandchild from seeing me. I was there when you were born and have always tried to be there for you ever since.
This echoes what I know to be true from countless conversations with my mom: Molly was hers from the beginning. And mom’s sense of safety, after having several grandchildren snatched out of her life due to circumstances far beyond her control, unleashed an avalanche of adoration. My mom did not hold back one little iota. She was, as they say, all in when it came to Molly. My mom once told me that one of the greatest pleasures in her life — her entire life — was walking in the front door of my house and having baby Molly run pell-mell toward her screaming in wild delight, “GG!”
Those two. Sometimes it was like having two kids. GG was definitely the cool grandma, taking the same laissez-faire attitude to grandparenting as she did toward parenting. For Molly, I’m sure this was a welcome relief from my perpetual air of maternal anxiety. My resolve to keep Molly from repeating my mistakes was myopic and made me tense. I think a lot of GenXers made this same mistake:
overcorrecting from our feral childhoods. Waxing nostalgic about our summer nights running the streets sans supervision while submitting our own kids to regular drug tests and refusing to let them walk anywhere alone. Mom, on the other hand, always let you do what you were going to do.
In a letter to her best friend Bonnie — another missive discovered in the Vinogal209 trove — my mom said of one of my boyfriends, “he’s not my cup of tea, but I don’t have to drink the tea.” I think that perfectly illustrates my mom’s relationship with the children in her life. She was always there to talk things through and was happily up front with you about what she thought about any given situation, but in the end you were deciding your own fate. You were drinking that tea, not her. She was also near useless as a disciplinarian. If you wanted someone to remove your bedroom door, or ground you for a month, or dole out a little corporal punishment? Mom wasn’t it.
Once, when Molly was three, she came home from a day at my mom’s and projectile vomited Cheetos all night. It was a horror show, ask Jack Souza. She threw up in our bed first, which we had to abandon like a sinking ship. A stinking, slimy, day-glow orange ship. We grabbed our one set of extra sheets and hit the floor, but then she threw up all over us again on our makeshift bed. Several times. I think the night concluded with the three of us piled like kittens under a thin throw blanket on a couch layered with towels. The next morning, when I told my mom what happened, she played it cool. She just said, all casual, “Oh yeah, she didn’t want to eat anything else all day but those damn Cheetos.” I was, like, “Mom. MOM! She’s three years old! Molly doesn’t get to decide!”
But, in fact, Molly DID get to decide. My mom indulged her to a fault, and even though it drove me absolutely nuts back then, I am now so grateful that my daughter had the force of my mom in her life. Had all those crazy adventures, all that attention, all that unconditional devotion. And, yes, even all those damn Cheetos.
Happy birthday, peanut. You are so loved.
