I’ve been a daughter for 37 years.

 

Unless you count the years between when my mother left and the year I forgave her, in which case I’ve been a daughter for about 16 years and a day, give or take.

 

I’m not very good at it.

 

Since my grandmother died, I have spent her birthdays either with my sister and my children or without my sister and with my children.  This year, I spent it doing something my grandmother would have wanted.  I packed the children in the car and drove to her home in Pennsylvania where my mother now resides.

 

The last time we visited, we left shortly after my mother introduced us to one of her good friends.

 

“This is my daughter, the youngest…”

 

“Wow, I didn’t know you even had kids,” her friend replies.  “She never talks about you,” she reiterates.

 

Almost two decades ago, my mother had left for Germany.

 

Back then, I was a straight A-college bound, good –though slightly obnoxious and bullying—kid.

 

“No one here knows I have children,” she confided.  “It makes it difficult to get a job when they think I have children your age.”

 

I was a smart kid; I probably should have understood things like discrimination.  Instead, I understood “no one” to mean, not employers, friends, lovers, neighbors, soon-to-be husbands.

 

 I was right.

 

By the time she moved back to the states, I had already tamed my 5-day-a-week partying, underage drinking, fake ID carrying ways.

 

I didn’t need a mother.

 

In my early twenties, I moved to Maryland.  A few years later, I began a family while ignoring anything that sounded like my mother’s advice on how to raise a child—what would you know about it, I wondered.

 

Over the years, we forged a skeletal relationship of two adults: one who took responsibility for her actions and interpretations of the past, and one who didn’t seem to.

 

Through graduate school, I called my mother weekly, sometimes twice a week, depending on how many evening classes I had that semester.  I was becoming an expert at timed communications: calling when I got in the car and ending conversations when I pulled up to my driveway.

 

When I graduated, my timing and phone calls suffered—I didn’t often notice.

 

My daughter often remarks on my relationship with my mother. 

 

“You don’t want me to just not call you when you get old, do you?”

 

My mother is only 56.

 

After our June visit, my mother can not reach me for a few weeks.  I return calls but again, my timing is off.  Weeks later we finally connect.  She has been in the hospital for unexplained bouts of vomiting.  I offer to go with her for the follow-up testing.  She asks me to wait until she gets the results.

 

The results come back negative.

 

“It’s a miracle cure,” she announces.

 

My mother found God a few years ago.  While I am not an active practitioner of religion, I realized in my ignorance of her reality that I had resented she had ever lost him.

 

A week or so after her healing, an ambulance brings her to the hospital for something else. She is sent home, then brought back and admitted.

 Drive to Pennsylvania or wait until she is released?  Wait by her bedside, or wait on her at home? 

I don’t know what to do.  I ask friends, my ex-husband, my boss.

 

I have no reference point for being a daughter.

 

My mother wants me to wait until she find out what is going on to make the drive.  It is only 3.5 hours away, yet I agree to wait.

 

My only conviction is that I have to be there, with her.

 

I drive up the evening they release her.  My timing feels off. But when I get there, when I see her, it feels right.

 

Since my children are with their father in Maryland, I have time to just be a daughter. We talk, I cook, I pick up things for her at the store, I drive her around, I am just me—a daughter, for two days.

 

My final evening there, she asks me to take her to her women’s prayer group. I am doing it for her; I don’t expect to get anything out of the projected almost 4 hours we will be there.

 

Inside the cramped church, my mother turns to these women she has known spiritually since the death of my grandmother.

 

“This is my baby girl,” she says with smiles, sincerity and all the love I have been waiting 21 years to hear.