Letting Go

For a long time I thought that the hardest thing I ever had to do was to walk away from my daughter.  She was 15 and heading off for a year as an exchange student in Spain.  We had spent a great week enjoying the sites in New York City before meeting at the airport with the group of students going to Spain.  My flight heading back to Oregon left from another terminal an hour before her flight left.  I still don’t know how I found the strength to turn and walk away from my child knowing that it was the last time I would see her for a year.  Intellectually I knew that I had to let her go, but the mother part of me wanted to hold her safe and near.


Several years later I had to walk away from her brother. Over a long weekend my son went through a battery of tests and evaluations and it was determined that he needed residential treatment for his substance abuse problem.   The day after Thanksgiving my husband and I drove him 150 miles to a residential drug treatment center.  I walked away and left him there knowing that it was the only real hope for a future that he had, but the mother part of me still wanted to hold him safe and near.


When people talk to me about difficult decisions, leaving my kids is what I think about.  Part of being a parent is making tough decisions.   The easier decision would have been to not let go, or to not see the drug problem.  Knowing that it was the right thing to do didn’t ease the pain of letting go. The ache was there, but it dulled with the joy of seeing my children grow and prosper.


This past Christmas my entire family flew to California to my brother's house in San Diego to celebrated the holiday.  The last time we were all together for Christmas was four years ago when my mother died a few days before the holiday.  Four generations celebrated Christmas under one roof.  I slept well at night knowing that my children, who are now 30 and 32, were tucked safe and warm in their beds.

The moments together are increasingly rare and treasured. However, these days it is easier to let them go because I know from experience that they will return safely.

I am grateful for family who love me despite my numerous faults and for my children who, even though I've let them go numerous times, occasionally return to the nest.

Tales of the Traveling Teapot

I found the teapot above shoved in the bottom drawer of the dresser in my spare bedroom. My brother stayed with me last week when he passed through this area while riding in Cycle Oregon. Before we drove him back to the Cycle Oregon encampment in Pendleton, I had scanned the back bedroom to make sure he wasn’t leaving me any surprises. I didn’t mount a full-scale search…I underestimated his deviousness.

The teapot belonged to my mother. After her death my brothers and I cleaned out her house. I had heard horror stories from friends about families that were torn apart as siblings fought over dividing their inheritances. My brothers and I were fortunate that my mother had a will and we had a clear understanding of how her “estate” was to be divided. Together we worked to clean out her house. Most of the contents of her home were donated to a local charity. Any items that any of us wanted to keep were placed in a pile and we took turns choosing what we wanted. There wasn’t any bickering or fighting…we mostly chose things that had emotional significance to us not intrinsic value. One by one we chose the things that were most important to us. The copper pot that sat on the hearth of my childhood home now sits in front of my fireplace and a small painting that my mother bought at an art fair hangs on the wall next to the one I bought on the same day.

The grandchildren were given the opportunity to choose a keepsake. My daughter saved items from the china hutch that she had given her grandmother. When I last visited her house I saw that the paper flowers she had made when she visited her grandmother when she was 8 or 9 are now enthroned in her own china hutch. My son salvaged his grandmother’s college papers from the recycle pile and a tie-dyed T-shirt from one of her college events. The writings, that include a story about my brothers and me, now live in a suitcase under the bed in the spare bedroom.  I don’t know that we will ever do anything with them, but I’m glad he saved them.  He still wears the T-shirt. I don’t know what the other grandchildren chose, but the process gave them some closure.

Somehow the teapot got in my pile of stuff. My brother agreed to store a few items for me because I couldn’t carry everything in my suitcase when I flew home. We packed up several boxes to ship to my home in Oregon. I didn’t pack the teapot. I don’t remember it from my childhood. The running joke when we ran across something that we didn't want was to give it to the other sibling and say "Mom wanted you to have this."   I told my brother that Mom definitely wanted him to have the teapot.

We scattered my mother’s ashes at the pier in Oceanside. We didn’t have a memorial service, but we did all go to her favorite restaurant. The grandchildren wore their grandmother’s huge sunglasses and everyone wore an assortment of buttons from her collection of lost causes.

I flew home and several weeks later the boxes arrived. I opened a box that I didn’t remember packing and found the teapot, several pairs of those huge sun glasses, a “Merry Christmas” button and numerous other items that I had tried to abandon at my brother’s house. My nephew had pounded in the side of the teapot to make it fit in the box.

Several months later I visited my brother and took the teapot with me. He found it before I left and hid it back in my luggage. Foiled again! It came home with me. The teapot has now made four trips back and forth from Oregon to California. We’re going there for Christmas this year and I’ll take it with me…and I won’t leave my luggage unattended.

My husband suggested that we don’t take it…and just drive my brother nuts thinking that he can’t find it. He’ll probably read this blog. I haven’t decided on my game plan yet. I’ve got a couple of months to work out the perfect hiding place. 

As challenging as my relationship with my mother was, it is comforting that a silly tradition and good family memories have come out of her death. I'm sure she wanted Leigh to have the teapot.

The Story Where Everyone Hates Nana

I’ve written frequently in my blog about my granddaughters. Being their Nana is one of the joys of my life. I’ve written about the cute things that they say and our adventures when I visit them in Austin, Texas. I just returned from my latest visit where I attended the wedding of my son-in-law’s sister.


The granddaughters were the flower girls in their aunt’s wedding. They had beautiful dresses and wreaths of flowers in their long blond hair. They were picture perfect. They each carried a basket of petals down the long aisle and only remembered to throw them when they reached the alter.

My job at the wedding was flower girl wrangler. I managed to get them bathed and to the church on time and keep them clean and out of the baptismal font before the start of the ceremony. (Although later we wondered if we should have let Hunter take a dip to drive the demons out.) From my seat in the fourth row I watched them walk slowly down the aisle and whispered to them as they passed me “Throw the flowers, throw the flowers!”

At the reception they roamed with a small pack of children and I watched to make sure they didn’t get too wild. We enjoyed the buffet and they managed to finish the meal, complete with beverage, without a spill. They had been remarkably well-behaved throughout the event, but we knew not to push our luck. We had decided to take the children home after dinner, and after a long exciting day, get them to bed at their regular bedtime. Nana would stay with the kids and their parents could enjoy the drinks and dancing at the reception with their friends and family.

Implementation of the plan was going just fine until the girls realized that Mommy wasn’t with us in the car. Daddy, who hadn’t made even one visit to the open bar so he could drive us home, was in the driver’s seat, but Nana was sitting in Mommy’ s place. As we left the parking lot the wails started.

“I want my mommy!”

“I want my mom…mom….mom…eeeee!”

Calm explanations by Daddy and Nana were having no effect. It was obviously all Nana’s fault that Mommy was absent. Soon a new chant filled the car.

“I hate Nana.”

I hate Nana; I want my mom…mom…eeee.”

Two high pitched, wailing voices chanted the whole way home, “I hate Nannn……nnnnnna!”

At the house Hunter threw herself on the floor screaming for her mother. Picture a red-faced cherub in a pool of ivory organza with tears streaming down her face. Her sister kept up the chorus wailing “I hate Nana.”

I told my son in law to go. “They’ll be fine.” I said “They’re just tired.” And I crossed my fingers that it was true.

With one uncertain look back at me he left. Two minutes later I turned on a video of Cinderella, changed them into jammies, and fed them a snack. The wailing ceased and they snuggled with me on the couch to watch the movie. I called their parents to report that all was fine.

At 8:30 we were snug in bed reading bedtime stories. Hunter dozed off before we finished the second book. As I cuddled with Megan she said “I love you Nana.” And I resisted the urge to tell her “That’s not what you said earlier!”

That’s the thing about family. We aren’t always kind, but in the end we really do love each other.

I'm grateful for family...even the ones who hate me!

Just Over The Horizon

I grew up in the late ‘50’s and ‘60’s in Southern California. Our house, on a hillside overlooking the San Fernando Valley, was surrounded by lemon groves until 1958 when developers ripped out the trees and built cookie cutter houses all around us. Almost overnight we had sidewalks and neighbors and one lone tree left standing in our front yard.

On a very clear day we could see the thin band of blue of the Pacific Ocean on the horizon. In the 1950’s pollution alerts were still in the future. The air was clear and warm and kids played outside unsupervised all day long and sometimes late into the evening.

We rarely travelled far from the neighborhood. Family outings were uncommon. Mom, Dad and little brother in the front seat, my brother Leigh and I in the back seat. In those days before seatbelts, my brother and I were welded to the plastic in the back seat by the heat. The only air conditioning was the air blowing in the rolled down windows. With the radio tuned to KHJ we headed through the winding canyon road to the beach. There was a long tunnel cut into the hillside and we begged our father to honk the horn as we drove into the darkness. We emerged again into the bright sunshine and around every turn we quickly scanned the horizon for the first sighting of the ocean. As we came to a rise in the roadway we anticipated the ocean on the other side. My brother and I bickered about who spied the ocean first until my mother would finally turn around and demand that we stop…and we would, for awhile.

I still think of those drives to the beach with my family. Although I live hundreds of miles from the ocean, when I find myself approaching the crest of a hill there’s a little flutter of anticipation and I almost expect to see the ocean on the other side reaching to the horizon. It’s a memory of the pleasure of anticipation. Sometimes it’s the journey not the destination that makes the trip.

I'm enjoying the journey.  Life is good.

Too Much Information?

The danger of this medium is that I become so comfortable sharing my thoughts, opinions, insights and foibles that I cross the line into recklessness. How much is too much information? The gift of retirement is that I am past the point that anyone will be vetting me for appointment to the Supreme Court or even for the position of greeter at Wal-Mart. I continue to be surprised at what other bloggers share on their sites. I don’t think I will ever totally lower my filter…and I wonder if my writing is any less powerful because of this decision? On the other hand, isn’t it awfully self-important of me to think that anyone even cares what I write about?

My brother read my blogs for the first time yesterday and agreed with my perspective that seeking out the positive helps with the path to happiness. He shared with me that his wife has a routine in her daily short drive back and forth to work to think of something that she is grateful for. He is convinced that this gives her the opportunity to think of him twice a day! That was one of my moments of delight for the day. I am grateful to have a brother with a sense of humor. We share an outlook on life that I don’t see in lot of other people. I could bemoan that he lives so far away, or that we rarely see each other, but it is better to celebrate that he is there for me and he gets me and when we get together it is a laugh fest. I think it’s time to make a trip to San Diego.

Shared memories, funny people, family…life is good.