Trip to the East--and Adulthood?

It was unusually quiet in our house last week. We were down one kid, and even though the loudest one wasn’t missing, any reduction in juvenile mass tends to lower a household’s volume level.

My oldest child was off exploring our nation’s capital on a weeklong field trip with her eighth-grade class. And I found myself enjoying the small pleasures associated with her absence even more than I had expected.

The phone seldom rang, and when I needed it, the line was free. The scattered hulls of the sunflower seeds she nibbles constantly were no longer piled up on tables and littering floors. I could ride in the car without the mind-numbing beat of blaring rap. With one less breakfast and lunch to make, I could sleep in until 6:30 each morning, and there were no blue jeans to iron each day.

But our family missed her in unexpected ways.

Clean dishes sat forgotten in the dishwasher for days, because she was not here to put them away. Without her to tend to them, her two little sisters lost the luxury of staying home, as I hauled them along on errands with me. And while her absence gave the rest of us a chance at the computer, we found we were helpless without her to log us on or download our games.

I missed her jokes, her questions, the conversations we’d have as she finished her homework and I caught up on my magazines.

And in the late-night silence while her sisters were sleeping, I realized that I was not just a mother missing a child, but a grown-up aching for companionship from the closest thing to a partner that I’ve had in this family since her dad died.

*

In her 13 years, she has never traveled this far away or spent this long apart from me.

And the three of us left behind have never felt so incomplete, so diminished as a family.

“She is three time zones away,” I explain to her sisters, guiding their fingers across 10 states as we trace her route on our giant map of the U.S.A.

And suddenly I am gripped by a sense of panic at the notion that my firstborn child is off on her own, 2,200 miles away.

In the days leading to her departure, I’d approached the trip with a motherly mix of excitement and apprehension.

What a wonderful educational opportunity! . . . But does she have enough clean underwear and socks to get her through six days away?

What fun she’ll have on the town with her friends! . . . But will she remember to unplug the curling iron when she leaves her hotel room each morning and to take her vitamins every day?

I shopped for her incessantly, then bombarded her with travel gear: books for the plane; a duck-shaped umbrella; little kits of soap, face cream and lotion in fancy, gift-wrapped, packaged sets.

She was gracious, if a bit dumbfounded.

“That’s great, mom . . . but I think I have everything I need.”

But I kept cramming--an extra sweatshirt, a pair of nylons, a few more T-shirts than she wanted--until she lost her patience and yelled at me.

“Enough!” she said, shoving into her suitcase the black chenille sweater I insisted that she take. “Why are you so obsessive about this, Mom?”

Why, indeed?

I thought back to my own youthful leave-taking, when I set off for college at 17. That was my first time away from home, and my mother reacted just as frantically. Her final offering had been a giant gilt-edged grooming kit, a collection of shaving and manicure gadgets that she demonstrated one-by-one.

It was lovely, but extravagant, with stuff I’d never used and couldn’t imagine I’d ever need. But something in my mother’s eyes made me accept it graciously.

Perhaps I realized even then that it wasn’t about shaving legs and tending nails but about taking a symbol of Mommy’s love along with me.

*

My daughter called almost every night that she was away . . . to touch base, see how the dogs were doing, pass time while she waited for her turn in the shower . . . or at least that was what she’d say.

Her sisters scrambled for the phone and babbled on, about soccer practice, the puppy’s antics, their favorite “Rugrats” episode.

When my turn came, I pricked my ears for signs of trouble, a note of homesickness or dismay. But she was upbeat, cheerful, reassuring . . . too busy having fun, it seemed, to miss our back home day-to-day world.

In my absence, she’d learned to iron her own jeans and to blow-dry her hair. She’d kept track of her spending money and toted her umbrella along when it rained.

But she had misplaced my good black sweater, the one I had forced her to take.

“I think I left it on a chair at the theater,” she said, sounding genuinely worried. “I’m sorry, Mommy. Are you mad?”

No, I wasn’t mad.

In fact, somehow that made me feel better . . . like she hadn’t grown up, she was still my baby, and she’d return still needing me.