The summer Sophie turned nineteen, I let her go for the first time.
I mean this literally and I also mean it in the other way. Her father had been gone for five years by then, five years of it being the two of us against the particular challenges that a mother and daughter face when they are each other’s primary person, and in that time I had become, without fully noticing the becoming, the kind of mother who held on. Not in the dramatic clutching way. In the quieter way, the daily way, the making myself available and the expecting of daily contact and the worry that was permanent and low-grade and that I had come to understand as the ambient condition of loving someone that much when you have already learned that people can be gone.
Sophie understood this about me, which is something I have always been grateful for, that she was generous with the understanding even when the understanding was inconvenient for a nineteen-year-old who wanted her own life. She gave me the daily calls and the explanations and the patience for the questions, not without sighing sometimes, not without the occasional reminder that she was not a child, but she gave them because she understood what they were for.
When she told me about the resort job in June, I felt the specific kind of pride that is inseparable from fear.
The job was at a lakeside resort three hours north, a summer position she had found through a friend of a friend, front desk and guest services, good pay and a room in the employee housing and the kind of distance from home that nineteen-year-olds need and that mothers of nineteen-year-olds have to find a way to give them.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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