Sweet Cheeks

Sweet cheeks

Missing my best baby girl something fierce.

Something about the Thanksgiving holiday makes me feel all kindsa nostalgic.

Growing up together with my girl, holiday times were always a bit funky; jangety and haphazard, and anything but traditional or predictable. Bittersweet.

There were the dreaded, seemingly never-ending drives along Route 3 (if you know, you know… the worst!) for the dad handoffs; not just around holiday times, but every other weekend, all year long, in all kinds of weather for many years, always in my cherished, old beater Volvos.

We alternated who got to spend which holiday with our girl each year. And, oftentimes the arrangements and coordination around pick up and drop off times and places could be challenging to say the least.

Yep. Gone are the days of me barreling down the road in my trusty (or often not so trusty as it were)tank of a chariot, praying my exhaust system wouldn’t fall off, or the heat would continue to work, or my headlights wouldn’t suddenly decide to stop working again at dusk when we still had an hour plus drive ahead of us…

All the while, sweet baby girl learned to just go to sleep lest she should have to listen to my oversharing about grown-up shit that no kid should have to think about, let alone be concerned about. Like money stress, and whatever else was weighing on my heart and mind. She developed a coping mechanism that felt a lot like tuning me out, but was in fact a healthy and necessary armor of self-protection. Wise one, she is and has always been.

There were also some sweet moments throughout our long rides when we’d connect and share, laugh, and sing. Ani DiFranco, Natalie Merchant, Beth Orton, Joni Mitchell, Greg Brown, Iris Dement, K.D. Lang, Jack Johnson, Coldplay, Earth, Wind, & Fire, to name a handful… we were all over the map with the tunes. And, often those rides felt like the best way for us to connect because there we were together, and at home there were chores, homework, me working nights, and then school sports, play practices, jazz band, school dances, and the ever changing and widening world of her own social circle and the compelling nature of adolescence, hormones, and all manner of related activities and proclivities.

I never intended to harm her with my verbal diarrhea during those long car rides, of course. I really didn’t know any better, and I didn’t know how to control myself. Now I understand how disregulated my nervous system was, and I guess I was also following in the footsteps of my own mama, who also sometimes lacked appropriate filtering skills in her parenting, leaving my big bro and me often feeling irritated and burdened when she’d go on and on about her man troubles when she should probably have been talking to a therapist.

Oopsies. Ain’t nobody perfect. But if we’re lucky, we learn, and we do what we can to clean up our messes. We learn to own our mistakes, apologize, and do better.

I’m thankful that my girl and I get to share some of our respective hurts and truths, along with our love, adoration, respect, and admiration for one another, in ways I didn’t get to experience with my mama. That we get to share, together and separately, what growing up and becoming independent and autonomous beings looks and feels like. I love when we get to share and support one another through our respective growing pains, as well as our wins, joys, successes, and failures. We get to cheer one another on and remind each other that we are works in progress.

I’m eight years older now than my mom was when she died. And Keira is 9 years older than I was when I lost my mom. I grieve not having had the chance to experience an adult relationship with my own mother. And I am so committed to cherishing and honoring this relationship between my girl and me; we are still figuring out how to navigate it in ways that allow each of us the space and safety to be who we are and to give one another grace when we falter in our efforts to be our best selves.

Growing up with Keira, always striving to give her the best I could in the ways I could within the means I had, I always emphasized this simple principle: be your best self. One of my brothers is known for saying upon departures, “Hey… try not to fuck it all up, ha ha ha…” And, I have to say, even when we each sometimes misstep, I’m pretty sure I have done alright by my girl as a mama, and she’s turned out pretty rock solid.

I’m excited to be thinking about planning another trip to the big city to visit and play with my best girl and her dear, sweet, handsome, smart, loving prince; her mf fiancé # august 2024. I’m so thrilled for and proud of them both.

Alrighty, time for sunshine. But first, I’ve gotta go deal with my utter failure of a chocolate caramel tart. Dumping that asshole in the compost and cleaning up the awful sticky mess, and straightening my crown after that big disappointment (one among several from Wednesday’s kitchen escapades ).