Heritage Festival - Reprise

Yesterday afternoon, after Tori got off the phone with her boyfriend. I asked her what her plans for the weekend were. She told me that she and her boyfriend were driving to Iowa today, but Friday evening she was planning to go to the Lincoln Highway Heritage Festival in our little downtown and "I thought maybe you'd go with me, because friendship."

I was still working, but I packed it up and went to the Heritage Festival.

Tori and her friend Megan at our first Heritage Festival

I believe we attended our first Heritage Festival in 2002.

It's a small town festival with about ten carnival rides, a lot of greasy food, three days of mediocre music, a car show, a sad little "beer garden" in the middle of the street and a Sunday morning parade.

We never miss it.

That first year, she and Megan thought they were wandering off and exploring,but our eyes were always on them and they never got more than 15 or 20 feet away.

Next year, they'll let her into the beer garden (if she wants to sit on plastic chairs in the middle of the street and drink cheap beer out of plastic cups).

Tori, Megan and Heather at the Heritage Festival in 2015.

Last year, when she wandered off with Megan and another friend (I didn't feel like I had to surreptitiously keep an eye on them this time), I may have wandered off to...um...sit in plastic chairs in the middle of the street and drink cheap beer with my lifelong friend, Todd.

It may have been kind of a lot of beer, though we also rode some rides and reconnected with Tori for a late dinner downtown as the festival was wrapping up.

Times change. Thus far, we've been fortunate enough to go mostly from one good time to another.

Okay, maybe things don't really change all that much from year to year...

Early this morning, she set off on the five hour drive to the Iowa State Fair with her boyfriend and I headed into town to wander the antique car show she was a little relieved to miss.

Now she's eating bad food on a different curb in a different state
with a different person. Is that what "all grown up" means?

One day soon, she'll be in New York or Seattle when the Heritage Festival rolls around, or busy with her friends or boyfriend that weekend, or just wondering what she ever saw in that dirty little street festival. Maybe I'll go to the Heritage Festival alone, the way I did in 2013 when she was out of town, or maybe I'll take her children. Maybe I'll be the one to have moved, finally finding my way to the ocean shore I've longed for all my life.

Maybe I'll have a moment of wistfulness, if I'm on the other side of the country. Maybe I'll take a picture from the top of the Ferris wheel and text it to her. Maybe for just a moment, she'll wish that she was eating bad food in a parking lot or waiting in line for the umbrella ride instead of whatever grown-up, glamorous, important thing she might be doing.

But maybe--I hope--we'll both smile, and someone will exclaim "I'm Superman!" and laugh or wonder aloud what might have happened to the carny we called Slash.

A Pretty Young Woman on a City Street at Night

That's what I saw. I opened this picture and I saw a pretty young woman on a Chicago street late at night. It isn't as if I didn't recognize her or she looked different to me in any concrete way. But, I'd have sworn throughout her life--would still swear--that I've always seen her as an independent person and not just "my kid". And this...this isn't a picture of my kid. This is a picture of a young woman out in the city with her boyfriend and somehow, that looks different from 100 similar pictures I've taken of her or seen her friends share.

Has she changed that much recently? Is it because I didn't know she was in the city until she started sending me pictures? Because she's standing in front of a landmark she's never visited with me? Because it's night and it's a tavern she's standing in front of?

I have no idea.

But, when I opened this picture, I didn't see "my kid". I saw a pretty young woman on a city street at night. Somewhat to my surprise, that was a very cool experience.

The Boundaries are Fuzzy

I don't mean the boundaries about what's appropriate, what questions to ask, who can say what, etc. 

We've never had that problem.

 In fact, years ago when my much younger sister earnestly told Tori that she should know that she could come to her when there were things she couldn't talk to me about, Tori came to me questioning what sort of thing that might be and why.

No, the lack of clarity here is much more fundamental.

Can You Be a Gilmore Girl in the Singular?

I didn't deem myself a Gilmore Girl. Years before I'd ever seen the show, people were telling me that my daughter and I reminded them of the Gilmore Girls. Even so, I was shocked when I watched my first episode, just three or four years ago. I may have checked my house for bugs and hidden cameras.

See, I'd always thought it was just the basics that made people say that--I was the single parent of a teenage girl. We got along and were basically partners in life. We both had long, brown hair, but hers was a little lighter than mine.

It wasn't that.

In part, it was the open lines of communication and the intelligence and the deep friendship that layered perfectly with the mother-daughter relationship.

But still, there was more.

Mostly, the constant, unrelenting humor and inside jokes and reference-based conversation. And the fact that when an online friend asked me whether we talked fast like the real Gilmore Girls, I was surprised to learn that they talked fast.

Maybe most of all--though I didn't recognize it at the time--it was Lorelei's constant, certain drive to empower her daughter to be the separate person she was meant to be, even though the inevitable result of that was beyond her imagination.

Sure, Tori and I made jokes about how when she moved out I'd have to subscribe to the magazine she usually read most of out loud to me on the day it arrived, and how we'd adopt the Post-It note system that the Gilmores employed during that awful time when they didn't speak for months.

But, the day-to-day stuff...there's no telling in advance what that looks like.

My daughter is turning twenty on Friday. She hasn't moved out, but she spends a lot of time at her boyfriend's house. As I write this, I haven't seen her in five days. The flexible life we've always lived together--I homeschooled her, and we both freelance--gives her the flexibility to go visiting whenever she likes, for as long as she likes...just like the way we traveled together throughout her teens.

Can I tell you a secret?

I love when she's gone. Absolutely love the formless days and nights and the quiet whenever I choose it. I get more work done, and my living room is cleaner. I'm an immersion writer, so that uninterrupted alone time really allows me to thrive, creatively and professionally.

She knows this, and it doesn't hurt her feelings. She gets me. She loves me a lot, and she enjoys hanging out with me, and she doesn't miss me when she's doing something else.

And then I get up to pour a cup of coffee and it suddenly hits me that maybe those days of running out to get her an iced mocha before she wakes up in the morning are truly gone forever. Maybe I'll never again see that sleepy little smile and hear her murmur sincerely, "I'm loved," because I knew she'd need coffee this morning and went out in the cold to get it.

And I feel like someone's kicked me in the stomach.

Change is an everyday part of raising a child, and I've long said that each new stage is in its own way as good as the one before. Though a part of me misses the tiny toddler on my hip, the shiny-faced kindergartner, the budding adolescent, I can't wish back any of those days...because I wouldn't have missed the ones that came after for the world.

I suspect that will be true of what's on the horizon as well. I suspect that I will be as unreservedly happy to see my baby moving into her first apartment as I was the first day she didn't look back before walking through the doors to school.

I'm pretty sure.

But, I don't know what it looks like. And I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in that, so I thought I'd share the journey.