She came home for Christmas and she was different and I had been told this would happen and I had thought I was prepared for it and I was not prepared for the specific way it felt to be in the kitchen with this person who was my child and also someone I was still learning.
Not worse. Not better. Just more herself.
More of the person who had been forming all her life and had, in the five months since September, been forming without me in the room, without my daily witness, without the constant low-level presence of a mother who notices things, who tracks things, who knows the face before the face knows it is making an expression. She had been becoming herself in a room I could not see and the version who came home for Christmas was further along in the becoming than the version I had driven away in August, and the gap between those two versions was months of her life that I was not in.
She had opinions about things I had not known she was thinking about.
She pushed back on something I said at dinner, not rudely, thoughtfully, with the kind of thought that comes from having been in rooms where ideas are taken seriously and started to take your own ideas seriously as a result. I felt the pushback and underneath the pushback I felt something that surprised me, which was pride. The specific pride of a woman who raised someone who will push back. Who taught her that a table was a place where you could say what you thought, that the thinking was welcome, that she did not have to agree in order to be loved.
I said: you may be right about that.
She looked at me like I had given her something. Maybe I had. Maybe the willingness to be pushed back on and not punish the pushback is one of the things I can still give her, this version of her that is growing past the versions I planned for, that is becoming someone I did not fully design and therefore did not fully predict and therefore get to be genuinely surprised by, which is its own kind of joy, the joy of a person you love becoming someone you could not have anticipated.
She went back in January.
I watched her go and felt the same two things I always feel now, the gladness and the missing, both of them true, both of them taking up the same space, both of them mine to hold.
