5.

THE ATTACK MOM

Hi, Mom!”

I’ve waited two months to hear those words in person, to see my sweet college girl. I weave my way through the mass of people and their stuff in the Los Angeles airport baggage claim toward her waving hand popping up over the crowd. Only a mom’s ears could hear “Hi, Mom!” through so much chaos from so far away.

The last time we were together, the sound coming from my daughter wasn’t nearly as cheerful.

She said I treated her like a child. I said she shouldn’t have left her new $65 sweat shirt wadded up on the living room floor.

She said I was too picky. I said if she leaves a half-eaten plate of macaroni and cheese on the counter for thirty-six hours and then puts it in the dishwasher without rinsing it off, it will not get clean.

She said I was controlling. I said I would disconnect her video game system if I found out she still hadn’t started her psych paper.

She couldn’t wait to go back to school. I couldn’t wait for her to leave.

And now we can’t wait to see each other.

My heart almost stopped when her caller ID popped up on my phone last week. She was calling instead of texting. Reaching out in the ancient verbal communication style of my people instead of the hip, silent, misspelled one of hers. She missed me . . . needed me . . . I grabbed the phone.

“Hey, Mom.” That’s all she had to say. I’m a mom-linguist at this point—can translate four hundred slightly different inflections of “Hey” and “Mom” into four hundred completely different meanings.

“I’ll book you a flight home,” I answered warmly, and heard many, many words of relief in her “Okay.”

I’m weaving through airport people now as fast as possible. I’ve had time to rest and reflect, and have two months of things built up that I want to say. I can’t wait to tell her how proud I am of how she’s making it through her first year of college. How amazed I am by her bravery and determination. That I understand how hard she’s working to figure out who she is independent from me.

I finally get through the crowd to where she’s standing.

I stop to catch my breath, so grateful to see her. All my love and longing, my pride and admiration, my eagerness to have a relaxed, happy visit this time . . . It all wells up, ready to pour out. I put my hands on her shoulders to pull her close.

I listen, in sick disbelief, to the first words I say:

“Did you brush your hair today, honey?”

She stops smiling and glares. “MOM.”

Incredibly, I continue. “It kind of looks like you just got out of bed.” Every single thing is working in my brain except the off switch.

She takes a step back, leaving my loving hands poised in the air holding shoulders that aren’t there anymore. Says flatly, “I like my hair.”

“But it’s kind of tangly and wadded up,” I say, using my midair hands to gesture toward her mop. I’m watching myself as if in an out-of-body experience, doing exactly what I wasn’t going to do. I hear myself make it even worse, if possible, by lifting my voice to a high, happy range so my words will sound light and loving and she won’t interpret my criticism as criticism. “Why not just pull your hair up in a ponytail?” I singsong. “I have a brush in my purse if you want to—”

“You. Are. So. OCD.” She cuts me off, scowling, and digs more deeply in to her side of the invisible line that just got redrawn between us.

“I was OCD enough to spend $145 on a salon appointment and special shampoo for you before you returned to school last time!” I scowl back. “Is it too much to ask you to spend five minutes brushing your hair before you leave the house?”

“Five minutes? It does not take five minutes to brush hair, Mother!”

Her luggage hasn’t even landed on the baggage carousel and we’ve already arrived home. Right back in our magical mom-daughter dungeon, where the deepest love on earth can instantly transform into a nit-picking free-for-all.

She pulls her phone out of her back pocket to get far, far away while she stands right next to me. I watch her disappear into her world and stop to catch my breath again.

I fell in love with her long before she was born. I had been pregnant for forty-one years with the dream of her the day I first touched the tummy of her birth mother, who was eight months pregnant with the reality of her. One day before, I’d been quietly filing something in my office when a phone call knocked me to my knees.

“A birth mother came in today who’d like to meet you.”

“What?” I choked back. I was single and terrified. I’d only signed up with an adoption facilitator a couple of months earlier and was still wrestling with whether I could or should really do this on my own.

Suddenly there I was, twenty-four hours later, with my hand touching the rest of my life through the shirt of an equally scared, unbelievably trusting stranger. In one day I’d gone from the dream of having a daughter “someday” to being half of a miraculous meeting of two moms—one who was bringing a little girl into the world; one who would take her through it.

I would say it isn’t possible to describe the bond that grew between my daughter’s birth mother and me in the four weeks that followed, except it felt to me, and I’m pretty sure to her too, that our bond was deep and immediate the minute we met. I will never be able to comprehend the selflessness of her love that made it possible for her to seek a life for her child she knew she couldn’t provide. I can still hardly breathe when I think of the faith she put in me to be the mom she couldn’t be. I drove my daughter’s birth mother to the hospital when she went into labor. The admitting nurse asked if we were sisters. So much more than that, I’ve thought a million times since that night. We are so very much more than that.

I held her birth mother’s hand while our daughter was being born. I fed the baby that suddenly belonged to both of us tiny bottles in the hospital nursery day and night until she was ready to come home. I made sure our daughter and her birth mother had time alone together in the hospital, and that the three of us had a little time together, too. Then I drove our daughter home by myself, just the two of us. I was so overwhelmed by the impossibly complicated emotion of driving her away from her birth mother, the incomprehensible joy and responsibility of becoming her life mother, that I couldn’t stand to have anyone else in the car. I was on my own and thousands of miles away from any family. My daughter and I locked around each other deeply and completely, and have been each other’s world ever since.

I look at her now, engrossed in her iPhone with the two thousand Facebook friends she’d rather be with than me. I would do anything for my child. I would crawl across the earth on my hands and knees to help her. I would die for her. I would give her anything—my food, my blankets, my bed, my air, my home, my life. She is my life. I would do anything for her.

Anything, it turns out, except keep my mouth shut.

“Pull your shoulders back, honey. You’re all slumpy.” I’ve lost all ability to screen outgoing messages. I continue . . .

“Pull your tank top up! The world doesn’t need to see your underwear. Suck your stomach in! You look . . .”

Her head whips up from her phone. “What? Fat? I look FAT??”

“No! Just . . . suck your stomach in!”

I’ve not only ruined our reunion, but probably the rest of the day.

Still, I keep going . . .

“Don’t chew on your nail! The airport’s full of germs. Don’t leave your purse unzipped! You could get robbed. Don’t wipe your nose with your hand! Use a tissue.”

I’m scanning her like a one-woman Homeland Security squad now. Scanning in reverse for all the unacceptable things she’s brought off the flight with her, seeing every possible infraction with my X-ray mom eyes. Her jeans are too ripped, her flip-flops are too flip-floppy, her sweat shirt’s dragging on the ground, disorganized papers are sticking out of her purse. And now, after months of my desperately missing her, she’s texting someone instead of talking to me.

“Don’t text someone instead of talking to me!”

“Duh . . . I was just letting my boyfriend know I got in okay.”

“Don’t say ‘Duh’!”

“God, Mom.”

“Don’t say ‘God’!”

“JEEZ.”

“Don’t talk with your mouth full!”

She doesn’t have anything in her mouth. I’m simply on auto-attack. Too much is pent up, too little has sunken in. Also, I’m angry with myself for not instilling all the things I wanted to instill when I had some power over her. I had nineteen years to create a meticulously groomed, perfectly organized, impeccably mannered young woman, and I’m staring at . . . well, a nineteen-year-old. I’m angry with myself for ruining our reunion. Angry that I do this every single time I see her, even though every single time I see her, I promise I won’t do it again. Do I have any choice but to stand here and attack?

Another big breath. Yes, it turns out. Yes, I do.

From the deep reservoir of maternal instincts, I manage to pull out the one concept guaranteed to create new life from the rubble of this moment. I think of the one thing I could say that promises to take this bad day and parlay it into something else.

Something much, much worse:

“Let’s stop and get something to eat on the way home.”

Ta-da.

I will take this highly combustible mother-daughter moment and throw the highly combustible issue of food on top of it. Under the guise of “comfort” I’ll toss thousands of calories and carbohydrates and two hundred years of rejected rules of etiquette on top of the drama I’ve already created in our first five minutes together. I will go for explosion.

“Don’t take such big bites!”

“Put down the fork while you chew!”

“Napkin goes on your lap!”

“No more rolls!!”

“Sit up straight!”

“That dressing just added five hundred calories to your salad!”

“Dessert? Really?? You think you need dessert?”

“Elbows off the table!”

“NO TEXTING WHILE WE’RE EATING!!!”

Attack Mom Smorgasbord. All she can eat, all I can critique.

We’re not quite there yet, however. We’re still standing in baggage claim, still waiting for suitcase number one. I look away from the restaurant scene I’m imagining in my head long enough to look at my daughter, who’s apparently looked away from the screen on her iPhone long enough to read my mind.

“Um . . . Maybe I should just Uber home next time instead of having you pick me up, Mom.”

I, having just destroyed our reunion and our day, and having thought of an event that could wipe out the rest of our visit, smile at my beautiful girl and answer as only a loving mom can:

“Don’t be silly, sweetie,” I say. “It might not be safe.”