The gift of daughters.

A year ago I met a woman.  She's a little younger than my sons, and so could theoretically be my daughter.  She was a little reserved when I first met her, as our meeting had to do with business.  I needed landscaping help, so she came over to talk about that.  During the next few months it turned out that a couple of times we were able to work in my yard together.  While we worked, we talked...about plants, our neighborhood, politics, my sons, her girlfriend.  Easy conversation that doesn't always happen across a 30 year gap.

The idea of having a daughter had been terrifying to me when I was having babies.  I felt much more intuitively a boys' mom and so was crazy grateful when I was gifted with boys.  Over the years it would strike me when a young woman would come into my life who I knew I would've been honored to have as a daughter...Julia, Rachel... 

Getting to know this woman gave me that feeling.  When she was getting ready to leave from my house one day, I told her this.  That she is someone who I would've been proud to have as a daughter. She's so talented and smart and funny and honest...true to who she is.  I find her so admirable. Sometimes I blurt things out, so I hoped that wasn't just a weird thing to say.  She told me later that she was touched.

I went to her wedding last weekend.  Powerfully moved by knowing that this marriage, which had not always been available to her, was the thing that she wanted most...she was so wildly happy on this day. I'm not a crier, but there I was, all teary from beginning to end of the ceremony.  There was also an undercurrent of something going on somewhere inside my head and heart that I couldn't figure out. Then I realized that her mother wasn't there.  

It's that growing sense of dread that happens when you feel like you know the truth behind something that's happening but you try and tell yourself it must be something else.  It wasn't something else.  It was that her mother wasn't there because she chose not to be there.  Now honestly, I don't know the whole story.  But the whole story might make me more angry and numb than I already ended up feeling.  What I do know is what I was able to say when I could find my voice...that if I was her mother, I'd be so proud.  Because even as not-her-mother-but-would-be-honored-to-be-if-I-was, I felt so happy.  So proud.  So damn happy and proud.

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Love and judgment and religion and the universe.  I think about these things a lot and they get tangled in my head.  Sometimes I get a little clarity and sometimes I make myself crazy pondering it all. I wonder about a lot of things and I believe in some things.  I believe in a force larger than me.  I do think of this force as god, present in the universe, available in ways that I can see or hear and ways that I cannot.  I believe that judgment, when used to determine the value of another human, is destructive as hell.  I believe that while judgment comes way too naturally for most of us, our hearts should save little room for it.  I believe that no matter how I choose to practice spirituality...follow god...listen to the universe...it challenges me to love more and judge less.  I believe in love. I believe we get to be who we are and love who we love.  And I believe the universe sometimes guides people into each other's paths as a gift.  

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Joy, you are a gift.



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