All My Women.

Yesterday, I put Caitlin on a plane to New York. This afternoon, she takes an Air France flight to De Gaulle International and then from DGI to Casablanca. She'll be based out of the Moroccan capital of Rabat, with excursions to Tangier and Fez. This is her second trip to Africa. She visited South Africa and surrounding countries a few years ago with her mom and step-family. The highlight of her trip was bungee jumping of Victoria Falls. She brought back a video of her plummet. Gives me the shivers just thinking about it.

Her visit home this time was very short out of necessity, really, because of an internship at Roehampton University in London, but made shorter by the fact that her mom and I haven't been married in well over a decade. So we crammed in as much as we could in the time that was available to us, which usually means getting in at least one geopolitical argument and making fools of ourselves in some restaurant. There is no other person alive that I more enjoy making laugh than she. And no other person that fills me as much admiration and melancholy and love all at once.

It seems that I have spent much of her life watching her leave, from the first time I put her on a bus for a grade-school field trip to Washington, DC, to staring at the back of her mom's car as they pulled away forever from our house, to the many planes and trains that she has boarded as she sets out to absorb the world's lessons. Above anyone else that I know, this young woman has taken the few advantages she has, and the many disappointments and loses she has experienced, and has used all this to mold a life filled with adventure, a quest for knowledge and an unshakable resolve to live a life of substance.

She is interested and interesting and fights through her fears with every step forward. This is what I admire most. Fearless abandon is often just recklessness and simple-mindedness masquerading. But to experience fear, in whatever guise, and still do the thing that you want to do, that is courage.

So she is off now on another adventure that she will drink in completely and make part of the story of her. I will see her again in two months, when she is once again home for too short a time, and we will talk and laugh and she will teach me things that I should have known long ago.

After I got back to the house, my mother came for dinner. She's in town from Connecticut for a nephew's graduation. We haven't seen each other since I got sick way back in September. She brought pictures of my niece's wedding from March, which I missed because of my restrictions on flying then. Nicole is as sweet as her mother and is possessed of a luminous, dimpled smile that advertises a welcoming, intelligent personality. We had a nice meal and talked constantly. It was good seeing my mother doing so well. My brother and sister-in-law have done good by her and she seems truly at home.

Long after dinner was over, I walked her to her car (which was up the street a bit) and sent her back to her sister's house where she's been staying. She'll be going back to Connecticut on Monday and I have no idea when we will see each other again. I took my time walking back to the house to the two women in my life that were still around: Sherry (thank God for her) and our pretend dog, Lucy. Lucy thinks she counts, but she really doesn't. But I would miss her.

Sherry and I crawled into bed after the rest of the dishes had been done and drifted off to sleep in the midst of soft bedtime talk. I dreamed of the women that surround me.

Few, if any, women realize how profoundly they affect their men; whether sons or lovers, fathers or brothers or husbands, we are much more vulnerable and attached than we care to admit. Women connect. And once those connections are made, distance becomes both an illusion and a formality.

My mother and my daughter are once again far away from me physically, yet each moment I can conjure the sweet relief of finding my mother's lap when I was young and hurt or the miraculous first second that I held my daughter. And I can draw close to my wife and lay my head on the side of her neck and say nothing. She will know why I am silent and it will be just fine with her. She knows that I will be heartsick for a day or so but I'll soon remember a story and tell it and we'll laugh and she will be for that moment every woman in my life. It's okay. Just like each of my women, she can handle it.

Comments

[Vavoom]

What a fantastic post. I didn't know you had this in you, Daniel.

[Older Bro]

Vavoom, you should read his Christmas and Mother's Day posts. It's been there for a while. Granted, those posts had special meaning for me, reflecting feelings and memories I've had for a long time.

Personally, I think Mom does realize how profoundly she has affected us, like a few weeks ago when it was a bad week and I just needed to vent. Sometimes I guy just has to talk to his Mom.

[Christina]

Beautifully expressed; however, women are no less affected by the men in their lives.

Thank you for sharing.

; )