I don’t want to lose my daughter to college next year. I’m already losing her to her real life and it breaks my heart every day. I am becoming the periphery, though loved and cherished. She’s got me mostly at arm’s length. I breathe with my hurting heart and know that all this aching is just grief, pure and simple. I forgot. I kept wondering why my body hurts. I still wake up in the night sometimes in a panic because I can’t find Hannah.

Keeping track of Hannah was my life’s center. Making sure she was safe, cared for, loved, and cherished has been my life’s work. I don’t know if I’ve done a good job. But the job I’ve done, I’ve done with more love than I could have previously imagined. Me and other parents, our hearts just break over and over. There has never been anything harder or more worthwhile than raising a child.

I was supposed to be such a good mother that she wouldn’t have any problems. That was the plan. And she broke the script all over and everywhere by becoming herself. My plan lies in tatters, in sad, abandoned clumps of plaster. The statue breathes and walks out of the room.

People often tell me what an amazing daughter I have. My Mom says, “She is going to be just fine. I just know it. She’s a strong, grounded young woman.”

So why do these comments feel like sweet rain bouncing off a roof of corrugated tin while I lie inside, tired, hungry, and thirsty most of all?

Our children manifest all that we’ve disowned in ourselves. They are like a perennial that grows exactly where you least expect it when you’ve prepared the beds elsewhere. She smiles at me from an altogether new place, one I can’t own and couldn’t hope to fully understand. And her smile blooms. She stuns me with her radiance.

Still, I sputter sometimes because, Hannah, you’re so different than me. Because you’re heading for the future, which I cannot visit, not even in my dreams.

I liked that Kahlil Gibran quote better on the other side, when I used it as my own senior quote my senior year of high school. I gave her everything, loved her more than anyone, spent hours and hours singing to her, holding her, teaching her, loving her and now she will just leave me. Holy fuck. And the that’s the good way this ends. That is the fucking happy ending!

I miss my daughter so much already.

I saw my friend Margot, yesterday. Her dad isn’t doing well. She said it was so hard for her when her mom died that she thought, “If I realized it would be this hard, I wouldn’t have had kids. I don’t want them to have to go through this.”

She said, “It’s good we don’t know.”

So we can take it as it comes.

And as she goes.