Category: Children

It is September, a time of new beginnings for college students and new endings for their mothers.

When my daughter Elizabeth went off to college in September of 2005, we grieved the painful gap in our family circle. For me personally, her loss felt like a hole in my heart, and the end of the mother-daughter relationship we had known.

I knew that Liz’s departure was what Judith Viorst calls a “necessary loss”, one of those times when in order for growth to occur, there must be loss.

But knowing that I needed to let Elizabeth go did not make the pain any less.

That September I wrote the following poem, to capture both the pain of loss and my hopes for our future relationship.

This year’s Memorial Day’s gatherings have had to be nonexistent or very small.

So, I’m remembering with extra enjoyment a large and very special Memorial Day gathering, four years ago. In May of 2016, most of the women in my extended family converged in New Hope, PA, to attend a baby shower for my niece Erica.

During that love-filled and happy weekend, I was remembering how much I had leaned on some of these women when I had my first baby. I was thinking of how we all as mothers need the advice and support of other mothers. As a gift for Erica, I wrote the following letter, trying to pass on a little of what I had learned about being a mom. (I’ve tweaked the letter just a bit for clarity.)

My granddaughter Hanah is 16 months old now, and at daycare she has been promoted out of the baby room.  She is in with the toddlers now. The toddlers get to sleep in cots on the floor (about one inch off the floor, but still, cots), and, an even bigger privilege, in the toddler room they do not take a morning nap.

So, overnight, Hanah has stopped taking a morning nap at daycare.

But physically she is still “in between”. Sometimes she needs a morning nap, and sometimes she doesn’t.

People say that the older you get, the smarter you get. But sometimes I wonder…

At 8 months, Hanah was deeply into her “attachment-to-Mommy” phase.  I was holding her as she napped and thinking of telling her, “Hanah, I’m 64, but right now I really want my Mommy too”…

There are things you forget, when your years with a baby are long past. One of them is baby time, and how it differs from ordinary time…