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EMPTY NESTING - tracy
Tracy married 1983 - 1623ww – 3/28/16
They come into your world butt naked and they leave it in a flurry of netting, seed pearls, satin and lace, appetizers and champagne. Daughters. I had four daughters, Tracy, Molly, Jaime and Margery, all born within five years. Their existence governed my life, taxing and invigorating my emotional stamina.
To introduce my decade of derailment – with what a normal woman should have celebrated as a joyous milestone in a family’s life – Tracy, my firstborn, announced her engagement. She stepped out of our circle first at a respectable twenty four. “Mother would be proud,” said my older brother when I alerted him of her engagement. He remembered my mother impatiently fretting until I, pushing twenty-five, finally turned one of three proposals into a proper wedding band. She wouldn’t live to see her granddaughters do her proud.
I expected Tracy to hang around the family for maybe a few more years. She and her sisters had seeped out periodically over the past years but the suction of family cushion usually pulled them back in. I grew used to their comings and goings. First they went off to visit their grandparents, then on solo trips to relatives, then to camp, then to college, then in and out of apartments. Their base always seemed to be our home.
Tracy reveled in the new independence that employment and her own distant apartment gave her. Planning her marriage with me for the months we dedicated to it strained the tenuous mother-daughter relationship since my holding the purse strings gave me power she resented. My mother planned my marriage, now I considered it my turn to sit in the director’s chair. But I struggled to maintain control. I had stressed woman power too diligently with my girls. Conflicts over many aspects of the ceremony were settled with psychic repercussions. Choices – of invitations, of music, of foods, of flowers, of anything that goes into a wedding, until finally the writing of thank-you notes – were in contention. In the end, a little professional post-ceremony therapy smoothed over the scratchy relationship that had developed. But only when I admitted to her, at the therapist’s suggestion, that I had been autocratic and promised that I would leave her sisters alone when they married. I think I kept my fingers crossed in that conversation.
The beginnings of the breakout included not only marriage but soon a business move to Boston (leaving her new husband in a next door apartment to replace her). A doctoral candidate in cell biology, John took little time off from his research to be married, to honeymoon then he quickly returned to his lab. Tracy, a brand new finance graduate and a budding corporate woman, left for Boston, transferred by her Big 8 accounting firm before the newly-weds had opened their presents.
Tracy’s John slipped easily into our family. I remembered our first meeting – at my annual Easter brunch. He unceremoniously joined a gathering of close family friends and relatives, hardly noticed except that he was a stranger, tall, sturdy, genial, with a casual air and confident face. He arrived with Tracy’s roommate and they all left together at party’s end. They traveled in packs, these newly independent men and women, all equally attentive to each other. I assumed and wondered at the time at her roommate’s good fortune to be dating him. Since I did not notice any sparks, I did not know that he already “belonged” to Tracy, courting her out of her own apartment. As I said, he was casual.
My surprised response, “Noooooo, really?”, came when I later learned that he had been a steady suitor. That’s what a mother gets when her attention is diverted to her own career, as mine was.
Taking my mind off this first crack in our family unit, wedding plans became paramount, my plans, my turn to have a stab at a family wedding. Tracy had the same idea, quite dissimilar to mine. Tracy’s prime position in the sibling line-up had trained her to take command. Every proposed element became a source of confrontation. By the afternoon of the wedding we arrived battered and belligerent, with pasted smiles on our faces.
I should have relaxed. Her taste tended toward slightly off-beat when twenty year olds of the day walked down aisles in flowing white and celebrated their weddings in hotel ballrooms. She designed a simpler chapel wedding. The bride, fine boned and delicate, chose a Victorian tea dress in faded bronze found in a dusty antique store. The dress presented a major problem. Decades old, its silk had worn its years well, but the aged cornflower blue piping elaborately accenting the bodice had disintegrated. Having had no say in the choice of “bridal gown” I did have a say in the need for repair. I took on the task. I spent hours disassembling, handcrafting new silk piping in a color identical to the original, and carefully sewing the garment I had disassembled back together. I am not a seamstress but looking at the finished product I could claim the designation without shame.
We commissioned a milliner to restructure a Spanish mantilla I had worn as a bride into a Juliet cap with flowing lace. No fight there.
She selected for her reception a flower/garden shop in the Lincoln Park neighborhood. The event brought kudos from the guests, old and young. unused to such surroundings as a wedding reception background. But exasperatingly complicated to execute. Putting plants, tables, chairs, waiters, food, music, music makers, liquor, plates, knives and forks, tips and payments and guests into a traffic pattern that would work exhausted me. With all this I was in charge after Tracy’s decisions were determined.
Tracy’s path to independence led her into John’s large cohesive family that welcomed the marriage. They had been through many ceremonies and made the whole in-law process comfortable. More than comfortable. Encompassimg. They all arrived from the East coast – carloads of them – brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, nieces and nephews (his parents were deceased) -- with platters of povitica, strudel, gibanicka and kolache, Slavic sweets reminiscent of his family’s native land that we laid out on the wedding reception dessert table.
Off they went on a honeymoon that involved me not at all.
My response to this departure, and each departure, no matter how often repeated by subsequent siblings, came as a surprise. Each left an empty bed and an empty heart.
Tracy then left her husband behind in an apartment adjoining ours to complete a dissertation that focused on DNA, or something equally small. He became a good neighbor, laid-back, industrious, with an immense appetite for food and spirits. He often would beer-sit with my husband while I traveled on business, so he earned his keep.
The ancient adage, meant to comfort possessive mothers, is that you don’t lose a daughter, you gain a son. We did that for a while but don’t be fooled. We lost a daughter after the ceremony; worse, John temporarily lost a wife, leaving us, an odd grouping, bridegroom and in-laws, huddled together until his graduation from Carnegie Mellon the following spring finally allowed his escape. Then I lost both of them to the East coast, living near cities that were not around my corner – Washington, New York – even Basil, Switzerland for a spell.
That wedding heralded the last modicum of influence I had over Tracy. With her husband as the steady support he had been from the start, she went on to her law degree, to motherhood, to a tenured law school professorship and to a reputation as an international tax expert without any input from me. Now an onlooker, this position proved difficult until I realized it was effortless.
Not my style, this effortlessness. So I continued to meddle. When called on. When need arose. One piece of advice I could have given: conquering crisis is not a team sport, that it is a solo flight with one’s own guts the only arsenal. Outside support is comforting only after the crisis is deployed, that one had to believe one was worth the effort it takes to triumph over crisis. Some help. I resented anyone having problems and coming to me with them when I had to pound out my own solutions on the shores of Lake Michigan.
She may rather have needed a nurturing mother with solutions. Good she lived on the East coast, far removed. Bad that I thought I may have had anything to offer to counteract the stresses of married living when the home I represented trembled with dissatisfaction. One morning a bird flew into my seventeenth floor apartment. To some it might have proved an omen, but I am not an omen-inclined personality. It came to my attention making a grand commotion while I made breakfast. Alone in the apartment, without a help-mate, as I had lately been, I should have been up to coming to terms with a creature that beat itself against my windows only wanting the freedom that the sky and the beach and the water beyond offered.
After a moment of frantic terror we both eased up when I realized that if I could subversively open nearby windows without frightening him into careening around my living room again, perhaps he would feel the breeze and follow it out. That worked. He left exuberantly. I left the scene not wanting to know what visceral reactions birds have when captive in Chicago high-rises.
I found the visceral reaction all over a stack of books under the window sills the next day. Of course I empathized. I too sometimes wanted to shit all over the place being held captive in that apartment.