Maiden, Mother, Crone

Anna, age 6, and newly-hatched Grace, 2/3/96

Yesterday I attended a "croning" ceremony for my friend Frances, who just turned 60. There were 20 or so women at the event, and I suspect I was the youngest one there, still wet behind the ears at almost-52. At one point we were invited to share stories of significant transitions in our own lives. Always slow to speak up in situations like that, the group moved on to the next scheduled activity before I had collected my thoughts sufficiently. "Transitions?" I was thinking. "Every day feels like a transition!"

Later I was thinking about one big transition which I'm still trying to navigate -- that of being the mother of young children to being the mother of a grown and almost-grown child, respectively. From the time I was 12 or so I knew I wanted babies. Badly. I wrote lists of prospective baby names ad nauseum. I bought little items of clothing that caught my eye, to put away for "when I had a baby." It was bad. Really bad.

Still, I didn't have my first baby until I was almost 30.  It was hard in all the ways you might expect, but also an incredibly joyous time. Except for the sleep deprivation, I believe I was in my element. 5 years later we had our second child, who died in infancy. I was 37 when our third child was born, and I got to experience all of the parenting a very young child again, another joyous time, though admittedly tinged by the loss we had experienced.

I absolutely loved my children's childhoods. I was the mom who knit sweaters, sewed little sun dresses and stuffed toys, froze healthy popsicles in the summer … Oh, it wasn't all a bed of roses. It was as a young mother that I was first diagnosed with low-grade chronic depression that sometimes made it hard to be the mother I really wanted to be. It also brought out some of my very best intentions.

You readers who have raised children know, I'm sure, how when you're in the thick of it you think it will last forever -- for better or worse. You might listen to the Malvina Reynolds' song Turn Around and get all sad about the future (at least I did, when my first baby was still under a year old!) but it doesn't seem all that close. All of a sudden -- WHOOSH -- they're grown up (or nearly so.)

And I'm left holding the bag. The bag of bedtime stories, little dresses, star-shaped baby dolls, plastic horses, and all of the other flotsam and jetsam of my kids' childhoods, wondering where to go from here. I'm not worried about it. There are many times these days when I revel in the freedom to just go somewhere, without either packing Cheerios and a wet washcloth or finding a babysitter (okay, I exaggerate -- I haven't had to do that in a long time.) I adore the young women my little daughters have become, even if I look askance at their fashion choices much of the time.

This is a transition that I find particularly bittersweet.