{"id":296,"date":"2011-04-23T14:02:33","date_gmt":"2011-04-23T21:02:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/alexfaye.com\/?p=296"},"modified":"2011-04-26T18:21:59","modified_gmt":"2011-04-27T01:21:59","slug":"the-green-dresser","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alexfaye.com\/?p=296","title":{"rendered":"The green dresser"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Green dresser, circa 1944<\/p><\/div>\n

My daughter Maddy moved out today.\u00a0 She is 23 now, and moving into her first one-bedroom apartment is an important milestone.\u00a0 And no roommate.\u00a0 This is not college, where she is subsidized by savings and scholarships and loans \u2013 she went out and found this place, put a deposit down, and now must pay for it, month in and month out.\u00a0 She has done the math a hundred different ways, and is sure she will be able to handle everything comfortably.\u00a0 She has a good job<\/a> in Pomona that looks like it will last for a good while.\u00a0 Although\u2026it seem as if this company may be acquired soon \u2014 the principal owner is eighty years old \u2014 and there is certain to be a shake up.\u00a0 If she continues to demonstrate her worth, she may be spared and integrated into the new organization.\u00a0 All this is new to her, but this is what I worry about.<\/p>\n

But why worry?\u00a0 That girl has always landed on her feet.\u00a0 She\u2019s smart, and resourceful.\u00a0 And I don\u2019t know anything about the company she works for.\u00a0 I\u2019m making it all up in my head.<\/p>\n

I went to go see the apartment yesterday; it\u2019s cute.\u00a0 It\u2019s on a quiet street, tucked in an older Fullerton neighborhood, within walking distance from the \u201caction\u201d of downtown \u2014 corners of Harbor and Commonwealth.\u00a0 It\u2019s exactly the kind of place a 23-year old girl should live in:\u00a0 tiny, clean, with families all around, and a big avocado tree outside.\u00a0 Today, she packed her room, loaded up her car and drove away, with very little fanfare.\u00a0 She said, \u201cI\u2019ll see you tomorrow.\u201d\u00a0 My eyebrows shot up.\u00a0 \u201cAre you sleeping there tonight?,\u201d I wanted to know. She shrugged.\u00a0 Maddy has no bed, no fridge, no gas on for the stove, no coffeepot, no couch, no table, no chair.\u00a0 But she\u2019s all dressed up, and anxious to go find her friends, haul her stuff upstairs, and then drink too much.<\/p>\n

I face the emptiness of my house with a mixture of elation and grief.\u00a0 I am going to miss her, but I don\u2019t think mothers should have a front row seat to their daughters\u2019 20s.\u00a0 It\u2019s not a pretty decade.\u00a0 There are bad decisions, tragic love affairs and ill-fated liaisons; there\u2019s vomit in the driveway and cigarette butts spilling over their ashtrays.\u00a0 I moved far, far away so my mother\u2019s worries were vague and diaphanous; she couldn\u2019t really put her finger on what troubled her, whereas I see it all, up close.\u00a0 I\u2019d prefer to see less.\u00a0 I am banking on Maddy emerging from this decade alive, wiser, and appreciative of what it takes to keep a household together, day after day, month after month, for years following years.\u00a0 It\u2019s no mean feat.<\/p>\n

I have little money to help her, so we are relying on her dad, who has been generous and accommodating.\u00a0 Today, though \u2014 he\u2019s depressed, and not up for shopping with me.\u00a0 He\u2019s been in a whirlwind of activity all week with his sister and her family down for Easter vacation; he can\u2019t do too much before he falls into his morass of dark emotion.<\/p>\n

I called a green dresser back into service \u2014 it used to belong to my sister, but it\u2019s been the garage now for at least 25 years \u2014 so when I pulled it away from the wall in the garage,\u00a0 I found black widow spiders, rat poop and mold.\u00a0 I ran inside to get a mask to go over my nose and mouth, and a scarf to cover my hair, and then I started to methodically clean this piece of furniture that we surely had on Winchester Street.\u00a0 This dresser dates back to at least the 1960s; Vicki thinks that it might be from the 1940s.\u00a0 I remember my mother painting it that crazy green color, but which house were we in then?\u00a0 Spain?\u00a0 Morocco?\u00a0 Petunia Court in San Diego?\u00a0 It has big round white ceramic drawer pulls \u2013 very 1970s in appearance.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I dusted it off, killed the spider nests, took a wire brush to every inside surface, vacuumed it, sprayed it with Lysol, wiped it down with Clorox, and left it disassembled to air out.\u00a0 It was a process, and during my work, I thought of my mother, and moving away from her house many different times.<\/p>\n

When I was 23, I was already in the north, flailing around.\u00a0 My mother was in this house, the one that I live in today.\u00a0 I had abandoned my Southern California life, and that included her.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t think of it that way at the time, of course, but I am a mother now, and I know now how she experienced my departure.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not that I want Maddy to stay.\u00a0 In many ways, I am relieved to have my house to myself once again; I suffered one hundred little indignities as Maddy\u2019s roommate.\u00a0 But my heart is breaking anyway.\u00a0 My child is grown, and her life belongs to her; I am no longer needed. \u00a0Well, I haven\u2019t been needed as a \u201cmom\u201d for a long time, and I suppose she needs to remind me of that simple truth as a declaration of independence.\u00a0 Providing food, shelter, safety and entertainment is a paltry thing compared with being somebody\u2019s capital-M Mom.\u00a0 There was a time when she adored me, but now, as she completes her separation, she must articulate all of the ways she does not need me, the ways that she exceeds me, the things that she knows better, the ways that I oppress her with worry or care.\u00a0 She has to push me to the side, as I pushed my own mother aside.\u00a0 As I scrub out the green dresser that my mother painted, I regret my part in this stupid cycle.<\/p>\n

It’s off to Target for a dish drainer and a broom, a pot holder and a dish towel.\u00a0 She needs everything.\u00a0 I try not to think about the San Luis Obispo yard sale I sat at 10 months ago, when everything I had ever given her was up for sale for a song.\u00a0 She sold it all and hit the road with Hannah for their WWOOF<\/a> adventure.\u00a0 Less than a year down the road, she’s a full time quality control chemist, starting a new life, and she needs a broom.\u00a0 She will be fine.\u00a0 I will be fine.\u00a0 Life is not through with us yet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My daughter Maddy moved out today.\u00a0 She is 23 now, and moving into her first one-bedroom apartment is an important milestone.\u00a0 And no roommate.\u00a0 This is not college, where she is subsidized by savings and scholarships and loans \u2013 she went out and found this place, put a deposit down, and now must pay for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family","category-rumination"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alexfaye.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alexfaye.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alexfaye.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alexfaye.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alexfaye.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=296"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/www.alexfaye.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":314,"href":"https:\/\/www.alexfaye.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296\/revisions\/314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alexfaye.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alexfaye.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alexfaye.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}