It's Always a Surprise

If you're a Gilmore Girls fan (and made it to the end--if you haven't yet, you probably want to stop reading here), you know that Rory and Lorelei got robbed twice. First, they had a wonderful week planned leading up to Rory's departure for Yale, only to discover that she'd had the check-in date wrong and had to be there the next morning. No time to say goodbye. Or, rather, ONLY time to say goodbye, and no time to drink in just a little more of that phase of the life they shared.

Then, after Rory's college graduation, they had a summer of road-tripping to roller coasters planned, but the job opportunity of a lifetime fell into Rory's lap...starting immediately.

I truly did feel like they'd been robbed on both of those occasions. They wrenched, for me and for my beautiful daughter, who has been known to glare accusingly at me and say, "Stop leaving!" when Lorelei drops her daughter off at college.

But, I also thought that it was pretty realistic. While those clear-cut and abrupt changes in direction might have been created for television, real-life change sneaks up on you, too. Sometimes, you don't know something is ending until it's over. Most of the time, there's no clear end point at all.

I think that's more true with parents and children than in any other context. A child isn't grown up o his 18th birthday or when he graduates from high school or when he graduates from college. He's a little different every day.

Joan Rivers said once, of her daughter, "Until she was 15, I didn't know where she started and I stopped." That's a little extreme, perhaps, and I couldn't put a clear date on it, because everything is an evolution. But, when you're a single mother of a single daughter, your life happens as a unit. Until it doesn't.

And usually, you see that change only in the rear view mirror.

There's no clear line here. In a day or two or a few, Tori will come home, and she'll be here for days or a week or...I don't know. And maybe we'll both be busy and we'll barely see each other, as has sometimes happened all along. Or maybe we'll have some down time and hang out and talk about the craziest things at a mile a minute, shifting from one topic to another so fast that you'd be glad you weren't in the room. Or maybe we'll take a day or two and drive the way we used to. And then she'll leave again, and then she'll come back again, and one day she won't.

Many years ago, my beautifully insightful friend Barb Cooper wrote a column about how she wished that she'd known it was the last time, the last time she'd picked her daughter up. I said then, and I believe now, that it's better not to know--that it's better to have the moment untainted by that sense of loss and nostalgia and the need to hold on just a little too tightly.

I wholeheartedly believe that, and I try not to speculate. But Christmas was haunted by my near-certainty that it would be her last one in my house, and I'm sure it won't be the last moment in which I involuntarily wonder.