in the meantime.

She’s nineteen.

To me, that’s sort of grown.

To everyone else, that’s certainly grown.

It’s surprisingly difficult to have two basically grown up women living in one home.

She wants to be boss

and I want to be boss.

Some of our days seem spent in a barely veiled power struggle.

When she’s hard to understand

and when she pushes

and withdraws

and when I feel my heart bend toward her

and pull back from her

as the hour hand shifts positions,

I think about my own momma.

About the time I was nineteen

and she was not

and we survived one another.

I feel robbed for about the thirteenth hundred time.

Sucker punched

and left alone.

What I would say across the phone lines

or across the lunch table to the woman who painfully birthed me into life

would be this:

“I’m sorry.

How did you live through nineteen four times?

How did your heart break and mend and leap and fail every day with nearly every expression and conversation?

What did you actually think of me?

I wish I could apologize for that one birthday.

The one when I left for college.

I purchased a willow tree for you and then I spent your birthday in Kentucky as a freshman

and you spent your birthday in Virginia and my friend brought a cake to our house

but I forgot to call

when I said I would

and there were no cell phones,

jus a singular wall phone for thirty girls to share on Johnson Hall.

But I never called.

And my friend waited.

With you.

And maybe you cried but you never told me

and I never asked you until now

but it’s too late to get any answer

and I bet for your birthday you didn’t want to sit awkwardly in your own kitchen staring at a cake and a boy

waiting for a phone call

that your only daughter –

your self-absorbed thoughtless daughter –

never made.

And so …

I’m sorry.”

I have to believe that she knew one day that I would be sorry.

I have to imagine that even as she sat there not really celebrating her own birthday that she remembered nineteen and her own struggle against dependence and her own lack of awareness for the depth of her own mother’s feelings.

I hope my nineteen year old daughter knows too.

Somehow.

I hope she does.

In case the day arrives when she can realize it for herself and I hope when she wants to call me to tell me she’s sorry that I can answer the phone when she calls to tell me.

And laugh.