I think I knew, on some level, that having my daughter back home from college for winter break would not be the same as it was when she lived here full-time. Of course it would be different. It’s supposed to be different, right? That’s the point.
But still, I thought, as I shopped for her favorite snacks and made up her bed with fresh sheets, that it would be pretty damn close.
And it was, sort of. Her friends trooped through the house, once again filling the space with laughter and chaos. The sink overflowed with dishes. Plans changed 27 times and then changed again. TikToks blared behind her bedroom door. She and her younger sister bickered and then snuggled up together under a pile of blankets to binge-watch “Stranger Things” for the fourth time.
But it also wasn’t the same, not at all. We struggled with boundaries and rules.
“I know you don’t have a curfew in college,” I told her, “but here, I at least need to know when to expect you home so I know when to worry. That’s basic respect.”
We lost our tempers as we tried to remember how to live together, how to share a bathroom and compromise on the thermostat settings and coordinate meal times.
There were also quieter frictions, like the way she scattered her stuff around the house, then bristled when I asked her to pick it up, reminding me that she now lives on her own and knows how to clean up after herself. “Then do it,” I thought but held my tongue, not wanting to escalate things.
And then there were the times when she’d disappear into her room for hours, FaceTiming friends from campus, laughing at private jokes with people who now know her daily life better than I do – people I don’t even know, unlike her childhood friends, whom I’ve watched grow up.
One of my favorite childhood books, “The Summer of the Swans,” described it perfectly: “It was as if her life was a huge kaleidoscope, and the kaleidoscope had been turned and now everything was changed. The same stones shaken, no longer made the same design.”
The stones are the same – our house, our family, our dogs, our favorite recipes, our holiday traditions – but the design has shifted. It feels comfortingly familiar to have her home … and yet also shockingly, dramatically different. Everything is recognizable, but nothing falls into quite the same pattern.
And thinking about that, about what changes and what persists, reminded me of something I read years ago about fetal microchimerism, where a baby’s cells remain in the mother’s body for decades. It feels like that in our home, like the echo of her will persist long after we have painted over the silly doodles that adorn her walls, long after we’ve moved out the last of her clothes and shoes and makeup and knickknacks.
She still lives here – she will always have a place here, of course – but she also doesn’t still live here. Her childhood clothes – her favorite outgrown T-shirts, her camp shorts, her smocked baby dresses – are here. Her favorite hair products are back in her dorm room in New York.
We are firmly in the in between, and I can feel it in my bones like the shift in the seasons. It’s a physical ache, like one that comes from hard work and that you tell yourself means you’re getting stronger. But it aches nonetheless.
Her childhood is over. Her adulthood is beginning. Both versions of her live alongside each other in this house. And they live in me, too. After all, I still carry her cells from when she was a fetus, literally close to my heart, a reminder that no matter how far she goes, no matter how the design shifts, some part of her will always remain here, woven into me, into us, into home.
