Little Horses And Tiny Sculpted Fingers, Grasping Memories

Sixteen-year-old girls are beautiful, quicksilver creatures.

They gloss their lips and line their eyes and somewhere between sleepovers and schoolwork and chores and obsessions and talk of boys, sometimes try to shoulder worries meant for much broader, more experienced shoulders.

Sometimes, life hands them burdens that even the sturdiest of shoulders would buckle beneath- and then they wonder why they hurt.

I wish I could fix it all. I can’t. But I try to do what I can.

If you read here regularly, you know for a long while in the year since my daughter chose to move in with her biological father that I’ve been deafened by radio silence.

Emails and phone calls unanswered, my efforts to reach out to her even through the mail distantly, if politely, declined. The religious divide is neither small nor shrinking. It's not one unfamiliar to me- after all, when I was sixteen, I was walking the very same rickety bridge, and trying to find reason in what everyone I had ever known, three previous generations of my family, had all believed.

There have been tiny cracks in the ice wall between my daughter and I recently. Little signals she missed us, and wanted to be in more regular contact(and a great deal of it in part to the just quietly being present in the background of her life and on demand as needed by her step-father, in a way that I cannot be for those religious reasons. Just trust me when I say it’s complicated. I am grateful to him for this).

Slightest openings have appeared and I have jumped at every one I could. Watching and commenting back to her on every silly YouTube video link she sends, every game she asks me to sign up for (me trying to play Words With Friends with my eyes? Oh yes I will, this is my kid I’m talking about here…Looks like it's time to start saving for an iPad when version 3 comes out...)

I’ve tried to keep any thin line of communication open that I could, while dealing with my own issues and, unknown to her, my utter devastation at her decisions; that after having her five days a week (joint custody) from the divorce at age two until she turned fifteen I was left with only seeing her a grand total of five times between February and December 2011.

And there’s more.

They’re moving across the country in a few months time.

After that, I don’t know when I’ll see her. I know there will hopefully be Skype (if her father will let her have it) but it’s not the same. So I take every scrap, every chance to kiss her forehead and inhale her hair that I can.  And I do my best to turn away before she ever sees the tears in my eyes when she lets go again.

When she texted me recently to tell me she’d come across her favorite small childhood toys, buried in a box she’d taken with her (I had searched everywhere for them before she moved out) and that she wanted me to have them, I could barely speak. She carried these little horses with her everywhere when she was small, had a special pet name for them and everything- and now she wanted to give them to me, “as a keepsake.”

What material gift could she ever give me that could mean more- could represent more?

So last Saturday was the day finally selected for her to give them to me, and I couldn't wait. We picked her up in the morning and brought her home- she had some other things she wanted to look around our house for- and we ended up getting to keep her overnight, for the first time since she left.

I’ve never been so grateful for surprise snowfall in my life.

We watched a movie, then stayed up all night talking- and I mean all night. I hope that it helped, in some way, to remind her that she’s still my daughter, I’m still her mother, and I still love her, no matter what, always. Even if her religion tells her she must exclude me from her life, the doors to my heart will never, ever close to her.

Even if it doesn’t help, at least I have those memories, bittersweet.

As time went on, we a little time talking about how concerned she was about trying to get rid of things before the big move. Specifically, she had planned to put some of her old favorite dolls up for auction- discontinued now, and worth a decent amount of money at resale.

The more worried she got- the more I thought about what little remained of her childhood being scattered to the winds and broken up- precious little dolls that she had loved and tended, hair brushed and dresses straightened. Fictional little girls who had been “best friends” for so many years, now to be pulled apart? As I had been pulled apart from my own beautiful living doll?

Something inside my chest caught. The lump in my throat rose, and I decided then and there what I’d do. It wasn't rational, it wasn't logical, but I really needed to do this.

I’d offer to buy her out.

I’d keep the few that meant the most to her- and so to me- and the rest she could donate, give away, whatever she wanted or needed to do- without feeling like she ‘should’ have sold them for the money they could raise.

When I offered, she hugged me tighter than she’s hugged me in a very, very long time. This worry over the auctions business wasn’t the biggest problem in her life, to be sure. Not by a long shot and I wish that it was-- there are some I can’t fix. But this one small "problem" I could just make go away- and you can bet nothing would stop me doing it.

Things are always complicated with mothers and daughters. No one knows that more than I. I also know that I have done my level best by her as a parent, always have and always will. Even if she never knows it, I kept many burdens off of her tiny shoulders- as any decent parent should- and I really have done the best I can. It's a shame when religious differences, even when respect for them is offered even if not beliefs shared- can drive a wedge as deep and far as the one that has been driven between my daughter and I.  In her view, I am dying a day at a time of a terminal illness, because I stand ready to be judged unworthy by god and so destroyed when that day of reckoning comes "any second now." No matter how I live my life or what I do- I can never be acceptable to them, because I do not believe what they believe.

That has to be an awful burden for a child to bear-and it's one I wish had never been put on her, or on me.

So now, on a prominent shelf in my living room, four proud, well-loved little horses, and the word that says it all…

…and in her old room, so cold and empty now of life it once contained, three little dolls will live.

Tiny plastic, contoured fingers reaching out, holding hands. Hair a little worse for wear, (don't we all wear with age) but together still, even now, and that is what matters. Each doll representing moments frozen in time, and as I stare at them they fill my head with the sound of my daughter’s musical laughter, of the make-believe whinnies of beloved toy horses and formal afternoon teas.

Dreams and memories of a simpler time, never to come again.

At least they chase away, for an instant or a heartbeat, the panic I feel when I realize with horror all over again every time

I think of it the fact is that if she continues on the life path she has is following, that the day will come soon when those who make the rules that she abides by will tell her to stop talking to me, to cut me out of her life completely, and she will be obliged to obey.

I don't know if a mother's love alone can win out against such things. But I just can't give up trying.

I'm haunted to know that the day will likely come when she will stand at the back of the aisle in a Kingdom Hall in a perfect white dress and veil, unspeakably beautiful, about to be married- and I won't be invited to attend.

My doll will be all grown up- and I can't bear to think that all I may have of her then is memories.

~bru