The Hardest Part Is Letting Go : A mother listens to the wedding march and hears the ballerina, the graduate, the girl who is a no longer a child.
It wasn’t in my plans to cry at my daughter’s wedding. I cry when I hurt and I laugh out loud as often as life lets me. I am proud of having learned to express the emotion appropriate for life’s moments, and I could not see anything to cry about: My daughter was marrying a young man who respects her and makes her laugh, whose ambitions and interests parallel hers. They like each other. What was there to cry about? This is an occasion to smile, to be proud and happy, as I was when she played a sugar plum in the Oakland Ballet production of “The Nutcracker.” In photographs commemorating her high school and college graduation, there I am, cheeky grin, full of righteous maternal pride.
My daughter certainly did not expect me to cry. I was looking forward to this wedding and the reception, dancing all night to ‘70s soul, the incidental music of her childhood. Kelley and I exchanged secret smiles as we sat through our respective hair appointments just four hours before the ceremony. We laughed out loud during the pre-wedding photography sessions in my mother’s living room. And when I saw her in the church sanctuary, my temporal-mandibular joint ached from grinning. I felt no sorrow. At worst, I was anxious for the evening she had planned for nearly a year to go smoothly, for the glitches to be minor and the night to be memorable. “Goodby, unmarried daughter,” I said to her in the sanctuary. “The next time we talk, you’ll be a married lady.”
Perhaps giving voice to that particular reality triggered the tears that took me by surprise. When the bridal march swelled out of the church organ, we all stood and turned our attention to the rear of the left aisle of the church. There she stood beside her stepfather, confident and happy, clutching her bouquet, fairly gleaming. My throat caught at her beauty, my heart actually leapt in my chest and I felt the swift sting of tears.
In retrospect, I cried for a host of reasons. My thoughts at the moment went something like: This moment is the proof that we don’t own our children. This moment changes our relationship forever. If he is not good to her, I will take her back. She is beautiful, objectively speaking. I was overwhelmed, and I cried.
The host of reasons? Once, the bride was a little girl who turned cartwheels in the middle of conversations and wished that I would wear high heels like other mothers, instead of clogs. The stately bride, gliding toward the altar slowly enough to give all the amateur photographers a fair opportunity, had identified the man at her side as my future husband when she was 12. It took him and me another four years to see things her way. This woman grew out of the teen who, in lieu of endless sorrow, decided to attach spiritual significance to the death of her beloved grandfather on the evening of her 16th birthday.
Crying seemed appropriate, suddenly. Not just because of the child I could see beyond the bridal veil, but because I know all the aspects of this girl-I-raised-to-womanhood, and how savvy, tough, optimistic and well-educated she is. Her marriage is the first road that I am sending her on alone. It hurt, for an instant, to think that marriage means the girl is gone, in a way made evident by no other milestone in her life. I missed her already. I have been married for nine lovely years, and I knew the work ahead of this fairy princess in bugle beads and borrowed pearls. I knew the hard work I had done, how much of myself went into getting her grown, and if she will take this man, my work appeared finished. I knew how to be mommy, but could not imagine, in that instant, how I could forge any other kind of connection with this person gliding down the aisle toward her future.
After allowing myself the momentary luxury of feeling sorry for my loss, I took a deep breath and felt better. I have always told her that feeling better is the point to crying when you hurt. She married, and I cried as mothers will. There was still the dancing all night to do, and lifetimes of possibilities for a woman-to-woman relationship with my daughter.