Mom's Daughlter

My daughter runs away from home pretty often. At this point it's not even running away. It's just "going to Aunt Asa's house because I'm mad at you". Not concerning.

If anything, it's routine now. I let my sister deal with her once per month. I do have to deal with her if it's any more frequent than that. But Asa does owe me one day out of the month because I give her and her husband discounted dental care.

Now don't go imagining my daughter is a little kid. She's 21 Although, she does have an unhealthy obsession with ragdolls since I taught her how creative one can get with making one. She grew up in a pretty healthy house, considering her parents are not nosy at all. She even has plenty of siblings- we have a total of 6 kids right now- to hangout with. Me and my husband even give them lots of freedom to hang out with friends and make their own decisions when it comes to their academic lives. If there's any time to be following your dreams, it's right now. What with all the instability in the world. I find peace in giving my family room to grow at their own pace while I tend to people's teeth in my private clinic. I do not even care if my husband switches jobs too frequently to ever become stable. A man's gotta to whatever it takes to stay sane; some people just fight chaos with chaos.

So this month, I think my daughter has figured out my monthly limit. It's the third month of me having to go and pick her up.

The first month, I went a little late because I was tending to a client. It was pretty dark by the time she got in the car with me. She smiled when she saw me, connected the aux and played my favorite song Dire of Strait by Sultan of Swings. The ride just went by with a couple more of their songs.

The second month, she asked me if I liked being a dentist. I told her all about how I was just forced into a Dentistry school by my parents and grandparents. Well, not exactly. It was supposed to be Medicine. I was supposed to be a pediatrician, seventh one in the scarcely populated bloodline as far as I know. After years and years of being micromanaged, I decided to be at least a little bit of a disappointment. "Maybe that would prepare them for the spectacular amount of freedom I'm giving you guys now," I winked at her as we reached home.

All her younger siblings had been playing in the garden. She's the only one considerably older than the rest. For a while I had thought maybe I should not be bringing more people to this world. But then my husband had shown me a documentary about the joy of a large family. Which was exactly what had been going on in the garden. I could even smell the pie my husband seems to have made.

And here I am, third month in a row. Asa is not driving her back home because it's the second time this month. While waiting at the door, I wonder why my daughter does not abuse the power she has over me.

And suddenly, the power of Asa's arm pulls my leg through the basement window down by the door.

"Drop into the basment right now before Maya opens the door."

That sounded fun. I jumped into the basement. I pulled a muscle in my back as I slid in through the window, Asa catching me just enough to soften the weight on my ankles.

"What's up?"

Asa looked angry.

Not that concerning. She was always the angrier one of us two. What with all the head-nodding and ass-kissing she endured through life.

She pulled out an obliterated rag doll.

"No." I barely managed to breathe out as I scrambled for the doll. Kaya.

She wasn’t just any doll. Her button eyes were mismatched—one deep emerald green, the other a pale sky blue—and I remembered how Maya had insisted on coloring them herself when she was little, claiming that one eye should see the world below, “We’re on grass on Earth, Kaya will see that through the right eye”, the other saw the sky because “But Kaya can also look up at the sky and know that she can reach higher”. Her stitched smile was slightly crooked, the kind of imperfection Maya had loved, because “perfect is boring,” she used to say.

Kaya’s hair was a wild tangle of yarn, streaked with vibrant threads of purple and gold, echoing the colors Maya had picked for her own hair in her whimsical phase of self-expression– the one she seems to have outgrown before I did, I thought as my streak of red hair fell from behind my ear.

Tiny patches of fabric on her dress were decorated with symbols only a mother and daughter would recognize: a little star for every night Maya spent stargazing on our roof, a tiny coffee cup for the mornings she tried making her own “grown-up lattes,” and a stitched cat curled at the hem, a nod to her obsession with ragdolls—and cats—that never faded.

"She's your daughter.", Asa pressed exactly into my cramped muscle.

The doll was very deliberately roughed up. There was no longer a blue eye. The seams of the smile were pulled out and cut at parts. There were no stars on her dress, rather crosses were marked exactly where the stars had been.

"I mean. Why? Why would she do this?"

I looked up at Asa. She looked at me with a very pitiful look of disappointment.

Oh.

“She’s your daughter,” Asa said again, her voice softer this time.

“..She is.”

I turned the doll around, “Oh, she left a star”

“You know she’s waiting right outside. It’s a nice starry night. The light pollution seems to have died down. Reason to appreciate the electricity outages”.

“You go write the rest of the things to be thankful about in your Gratitude Journal. I have a daughter to talk to.”

Asa pulled a random old journal from her shelf of journals, “Yes, I better get to it.”

“Mom!,” I looked up at the window and Maya was just right there with a big fat smile on her face as if everything is awesome. “Come on! We have a doll to rebuild.”

“You– You just go wait in the car!”, I turned around realizing my eye shape makes it easier for mascara to spread like the plague.

I don’t exactly think I’m as cool as the facade I put up when I can’t even bring myself to start talking to her in the car.

"I love you, Mom.”

Oh.

“Saying it feels like holding a photo that keeps fading.”

“..Maya, you know I love you too. I’m really sorry you couldn’t just come to me for this. For how you felt.”

“I appreciate your freedom, but you’re so.. It’s like you’re always playing this stable character. If I had said anything directly to you, it might’ve just blown away into the soil, to keep your character standing over it.”

So I suck.

“Let me at least have some moments with you. Intentional time together. I need little snapshots with you.. or I forget you’re really my mother."

“Wow, you should be a writer! Did you come up with that yourself?”

“Mom!”

“Ok, sorry, sorry!” I laughed.

“.. I did. I thought about what exactly to say to make you understand. I.. I don’t really get along with others at home. And it’s like the one person I used to feel at home with isn’t even there anymore. She’s been busy shooing the bird away as soon as she grew feathers on her wings or something.”

“Ah. Maya, honey,” I cringe as I say that. I really should not.. I really should never have let endearments get unfamiliar. “I thought I was giving the sky to the little bird.”

“And I appreciate it. Just please, know that I like staying on my feet with you too.”

When we reached home, we watched the sky until my husband called me inside.

“So will you sew the blue button and stars back on or should I do it?”

“No, we need a new doll.”