Payback Isn't Always a Bitch.

Photo by Olivier Collet on Unsplash

Photo by Olivier Collet on Unsplash

“I hope you get payback, Julie!”  

My mother was referring to my insistence to visit every public bathroom while we were out to dinner.  When I was little, I feigned having to go just so I could catch a glimpse, disrupting countless dinners. 

I have no idea why. 

Our baby girl, Paige, ended up being the one to pay me back and I would laugh thinking about my mom’s wishes.  Yes, I was getting my payback, but it also reminded me of my mom.

Now, however, I’m getting a different kind of payback, one of which my mother never prepared me.  

I visited my 89-year-old father last week.   Not every time but there are many, when he reminds me how I broke my mother’s heart when I moved East.  Truth is, I broke her heart when I moved South, too.  I remember that day.  I reached to open the door to walk out and she stepped in front of it, closing it and cried in my arms.  She wasn’t ready.  I probably wasn’t either, but I had to go.  

That’s the tricky thing about children.  As Kahlil Gibran wrote in The Prophet, "They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.”  I’m not confident my Mom and Dad read The Prophet, but this seemed to be their philosophy.  

They let us make our own choices, good, bad and ugly.  They said very little, no matter how deep the parental heartache, a strategy far from today’s Lawnmower Parent.  Flying from the nest was an implied must and fly we did, some further than others, never once being told not to.  They let us learn, no matter the fall.  We also knew we could count on them to help us with the pieces. They knew our lives were our lives, apart from them but not separated from them.

Years later, in a rare moment,  my father lectured me about the mistake I made by making my children the center of my universe. 

I understand now why I did and more importantly, now why I don’t.      

Today, I jokingly say, “we downsized so our children won’t come home.” Truthfully, I do want them to come home, I just don’t want them to stay home.  I no longer define myself as a mother of five.  I’m my own me.  They are their own they.  

Twenty plus years later, what goes around, comes around.  I, too, have had to let go of what was once “mine,” again and again and in May, again, when Paige leaves VT for CA.  And while I haven’t held her hand to find a public bathroom in a long time, I know I will hold her hand figuratively as she navigates life apart from me and towards her own.  Yes, they have broken my heart as I broke my mom’s, but it isn’t personal, it’s parental. 

Payback is bittersweet.