For six weeks I’ve been joking that I would tie Suzanne to a chair to keep her from boarding the plane back to Benin. Now the moment is here: she leaves today.
But I’ve come up with a better idea. In a month I’m planning to visit her.
So it’s “see you soon” instead of “goodbye” — “a bientot” instead of “au revoir.”
Don’t know how I could let her go otherwise …
This is the second to last day of the month — but the absolute last day for me to be the parent of a teenager. It was an era that began innocuously enough in October of 2001 — but stepped up in intensity as years progressed and there were three teenage girls in the house.
Oh, the drama! Oh, the laughter! Oh, the driving lessons, the boyfriends, the required parental participation in track meets and band concerts and cookie dough sales. Oh, the anger and the misunderstandings and the hours spent waiting for texts and phone calls to be returned. Oh, the late nights and the early mornings and the long talks after which things finally seemed right again.
It’s all part of growing up, I know, part of separating and achieving independence. Also nature’s way of preparing parents to be empty-nesters.
Now that the waters are calmer (notice I said “calmer” not “calm”), now that I have three young adults who are kind, generous and funny — in other words, now that the teenage years are ending — it’s possible to write a post about the teenage years. Before now, it hasn’t been.
So here’s to the next era, when all three girls are in their 20s. Can they be that old? Can I? Nah, it isn’t possible!
I’ve always been an adventurous traveler, preferring trips to places
I’ve never been before. I’m seeing now what great good comes from
returning over and over to the same place, a family place, in this case a cottage named Thule.
Flipping through the old guestbooks here, seeing the girls’ handwriting change through the years, reading entries from those no longer with us, I gain for a few minutes what I’m always craving but so seldom have — perspective.
I remember the party boats, campfires and paddles into secret coves, the skits and the late-night swims. I also recall how nervous I was when the children were young. Would they fall out of the canoe? Could they swim across the lake and back?
Reading the old journals, it all comes back to me — the time when Claire split her foot on a shell, the visit when Suzanne almost drove her grandmother’s car off the road, the summer when Celia learned to kayak. All those visits are part of them, part of me — and part of this place. Reading the guestbooks brings them alive again.
Suzanne was born 26 years ago today. It’s the first birthday I’ve spent with her in three years. Not that one expects to be with an adult child on every birthday, but after having her so far away from home these last three years having her here feels pretty darn good.
I think today as I always do about the moment I first saw her — and the feeling is as clear today as it was then. It was a supercharged familiarity. “I know you,” I said to myself the instant I glimpsed her face. “Of course. It’s you.”
And even though she lives in Africa now, and has been independent for years, I still have that feeling about her — and about Claire and Celia, too. There they are, I think, as I watch them grow up and enter their own lives, the children I was meant to have. As unmistakable as blood or water.
After what seemed like an eternity, we saw Suzanne. She was wearing a short-sleeved “Virginia is for Runners” t-shirt and
her arms and face were tan. She was wheeling three large suitcases and a carry-on. (I later learned that only
one of those large bags was hers; the others were for Peace Corps friends.)
The first impression — that ever amazing,
important first impression — was that she’s a world traveler now. There was a
nonchalance in the way she wheeled the bags, a certain jauntiness about her.
My second impression — or perhaps I should say thought once I was capable of having thoughts — was that I don’t ever want her to leave again.
It’s not only possible now but entirely sensible to count down to Suzanne’s arrival in hours not days. No more than 32, if all goes well! Her plane is scheduled to touch down at Dulles tomorrow at 2:30 p.m. She’s well into her departure preparations, I imagine, and will leave for the airport in five or six hours for an overnight flight to Brussels, where she transfers to the plane that will bring her home.
The last time I saw her was June 24, 2012. A lot has happened since then.
This is one of the last images I have of Suzanne, walking with two heavy suitcases through a crowded Union Station. She would begin her long journey aboard a train for Philadelphia, meeting up with other Peace Corps volunteers there for the flight across the ocean to in-country training.
She’s not returning for good tomorrow — I wish! — but she does have a six-week leave, and I’ve warned her that she may find herself tied to a chair come December 1. Besides, we’re not thinking of departures now, only arrivals.
For now there’s a new day dawning, grocery shopping and last-minute tidying still to do — and only hours till she arrives.
It seemed like this day would never come. And now it’s tomorrow.
I try to think of something else but it’s hard not to. I have a daughter flying into Dulles from West Africa this weekend. She’s not arriving from one of the affected countries but from somewhere close. And while at this point the extra scrutiny (temperatures taken, isolation if necessary) only applies to passengers arriving from Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, I wonder if officials will widen the net, start checking those arriving from any West African nation.
It’s fear at work, I know. But fear is contagious, too. And just as there’s no vaccine for Ebola so also there is no immunization for fear. Information doesn’t help — it’s hard to read a newspaper or watch the news — but ignorance is no better.
One of the most poignant news programs I’ve heard about the epidemic described what doctors and nurses do in Liberia before starting their shifts. Here they are on the front lines, dealing with Ebola patients every day, wearing substandard protective gear and working in primitive conditions. And what do they do before anything else? They stand in a circle, they pray and they sing.
If they can sing, so can we. Sing in their honor. Sing for their safety. Sing until the fear goes away.
Yesterday word came from Suzanne. Her home leave is approved! She will be arriving at Dulles Airport at 1:30 on October 20 — and she’ll be in the U.S. for six weeks!
The Peace Corps grants paid home leave to folks who sign on for a third year. Suzanne has already started her new job, as technical assistant to Population Services International and its Beninese partner, planning and training for the peer-education program there known as Amour et Vie. PSI estimates that in 2012 alone its services helped prevent 1,340 HIV cases, more than 70, 000 unwanted pregnancies and almost 30,000 cases of diarrhea.
The peer educators now give Ebola prevention suggestions, too. But their primary work is to bring about the sort of deep-boned changes that will someday lift the country out of poverty — and these will continue long after the epidemic is in check.
It’s good, important work — but it’s thousands of miles away. I’m beyond excited to know that our girl will be home soon — at least for a while!
My walk yesterday nudged right up against the morning rush hour. Not the D.C., Reston or Vienna rush hour — but the Folkstone rush hour.
Because my subdivision’s “main drag” leads to the local elementary school we have a half hour in the morning and a half hour in the afternoon when active pedestrians risk being run over by a convoy of mini-vans.
Not so for me today; I squeaked in before the brigade. But I wasn’t too early for the bus stop coffee klatsch. Whether by choice or requirement, every child now waiting at the bus stop waits with at least one parent. Gone is the small kid society my children enjoyed during those years — with its own hierarchy and pecking order, sixth-grade patrols at the top, morning kindergartners at the bottom.
Now it’s a time for parents to chit-chat and kids to revolve around them. It’s another way that childhood is changing, another thing I miss about the way things used to be.
Like many children, especially now grown-up ones, I spent hours reading fairy tales. I don’t remember special favorites, only the joy I knew at the covers of the books, some of them still vivid in memory. Those stories took me to another shore, and then, when it was time to come home, they deposited me safely back again.
I know there are theories of why fairy tales are good for children, that they allow kids to face fears and work out complex feelings. But over the weekend I read the best explanation yet of what fairy tales meant to me. It comes from an essay by C.S. Lewis:
“Fairy land arouses a longing for he knows not what. It stirs and troubles him (to his life-long enrichment) with the dim sense of something beyond his reach and, far from dulling or emptying the actual world, gives it a new dimension of depth. He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods: the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted.”
So here’s to the real woods I walk in that will always be touched with magic, and here’s to the magic of this lovely explanation why.
