Prom talk had become a focal point of our nightly dinner conversation. The first of Principessa’s friends to be invited to prom had no romantic story to share, but rather a comical rendition of boy meets girl.
I imagine it started weeks earlier in the mind of a boy who had never spoken to the pretty girl in class that he admired. One day, with stomach churning, blood rushing to the face, and the room spinning, the boy popped the question, “Will you go to prom with me?” Fear made it difficult for the boy to hold his position long enough to hear a response. He may faint.
“Sure,” the girl answered. “Can I have your phone number?”
The boy hardly registered the answer or the question; his ears were thumping from a pounding pulse. The otherwise simple task of recalling his phone number proved to be too much. The boy had exhausted himself. Later, please.
Brave on the boy. And on the girl. Double brave on the girl who asked a boy and got rejected. Prom is not for sissies.
Having survived my own proms, I enjoyed watching this one from my mother seat. I was very practical, I thought, by not getting swept up in the nonsense. Until the big day…
No one was more shocked than me when I welled up. Crying isn’t my thing, especially in public. But the sight of my first-born looking all grown up was too much for a sentimental soul. I used to loathe the cliché ‘they grow up so fast.’ But it’s true what they say about time flying. When you arrive at a transition point like this, your history of parenting fades so quickly, it’s as if it never happened.
I hold my hands up, one directly in front of the other, to illustrate my point to Principessa. “It’s like the memory – no, the feeling – of holding you for the first time is here, right next to the sight of you in your prom dress. It’s THAT close. And THAT overwhelming. It’s as if all those years between birth and now are condensed to mere milliseconds.
If you had asked me hours before if my daughter could matter more to me than she already does, I would have said, “No, I can’t imagine how.” And yet, watching her walk away with a boy, she somehow mattered more. It’s like there’s a scale from 1 to 10 and I would have sworn that she mattered to me with a 10. But then I contemplate sending her into the world and suddenly my heart is filled with a 5000 kind of mattering.
I am in grave danger of ‘losing it’ when husband makes a joke. I manage to pull up my big girl britches and remind myself that Prinicpessa is not gone. She is not dying or even moving out of the house – yet. More importantly, she is not moving out of my heart – EVER. She has rented space in my physical world for 16 years. But she has purchased a space in my heart for life. In this space, she will never leave me.
This one thought gets me to midnight when Principessa returns home, sans shoes like Cinderella. “It was like a dream,” she said. We smiled at each other and I kissed her goodnight as I have thousands of times. And yet, it was like kissing her for the very first time.
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I wish my father would have been kinder about fat girls. Perhaps I wouldn’t have starved myself in order to appear well-under the imagined weight that was the threshold of his love.
Chaos & Clarity 