The Wormlips Scrapbook

I really don’t get it. Why am I so distraught? It’s the natural order of things that one’s child grows up and moves on. At least we hope that’s what they choose to do. There are always people like poor old (my age) Billy P. who still lives with his mother. (Maybe if he’d just change his name to “Bill” the spell would be broken?) But we all know that those people are creepy.

Why, then, do I walk around the house all teary as though my very heart had been ripped from its socket? I knew I’d have a hard time with this, but really …

The first day Lulu was gone I washed five loads of sheets that had accumulated in dark recesses of her room. (Okay, so I haven’t washed them yet, but I did get them as far as the washing machine.) I stripped her bed and aired out the mattress. But then every time I walked past her room and saw the naked bed, I’d fall apart.

It’s not like I’ll never see her again, or that she won’t be back here for a visit. But that’s just it: it will be a visit. As the months go by, I’m guessing this’ll be less and less like home to her. I remember after I left for college when my parents would ask “When are you coming home?” The question made me cranky: “Why do they call it ‘home’? I don’t live in that stupid old place any more. My real home is New York now.”

Of course I’m still looking for my Real Home, but that’s another topic.

Anyway, after passing by Lulu’s abandoned bed one time too many, I couldn’t take it any more. I dug through the linen cabinet to find sheets that actually matched. I’ve never made a bed so neatly in my life. I smoothed every wrinkle. On her pillow I laid a shawl I made for her years ago. I cocked my head this way and that, looking for more wrinkles to smoothe.

Lulu: when you come home your bed will be waiting. I’ll have your covers turned down and a Lindor truffle on your pillow. And look: I’ve even got that cursed electric blanket plugged in for you.

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Okay, this is really weird.

As soon as I left for college back in nineteen-aught-seventy-two, my mother started sending clippings: first, newspaper articles about acquaintances’ weddings. Then the jobs, honors and children of these same people. Now, of course, the deaths have started rolling in, mostly of adults important to me when I was young, but also of my peers. Woven through these threads have been the odds and ends: a feature from Antiques Digest about a 1700s green-glass bottle like the one my great-grandparents had; a real estate ad about the sale of the house I grew up in; a blurb from the Wilmington police blotter about that kid I used to hang out with, Carmine, who just got thrown in jail for murder. Often Mom scrawls little notes in the margin: “Didn’t you used to know him?”

Then came the articles about the advantages of tattoo-removal.

While I’ve always appreciated her making the effort to send me this stuff, I’ve never understood why she does it. Every single time I get one of these, my brain goes through the same sequence: “What’s this? Doesn’t look like a bill. Oh, it’s a letter from Mom! Yay! I love getting real letters … [rip] … Oh, man. Another stupid clipping.”

So what do I do within 12 hours of coming home to a Lulu-less house for the first time? I cut out two articles from the university’s monthly and send them to Lulu at her new dorm room. One’s about an entomologist who helped with a murder case by identifying the native region of bugs splatted on a car’s fender, to determine where the driver had been. And I didn’t even bother to jot anything into the margin. All I did was take a Barbie-Pink highlighter to call out the parts I most wanted Lulu to read.

On another note: when I threw back the covers last night to crawl into bed, I found a card from Lulu, accompanied by two dark chocolate candies. As I inhaled the latter I read the former. I was deeply moved, and appreciative beyond all reason.

Shortly after I read the card, I fell asleep while holding my tall glass of grape juice and fizzy water. I woke up an hour later with an upside-down glass in my hand and several ounces of grape juice and fizzy water on my chest.

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Tomorrow Lulu leaves for college. That day that I first brought her back from the hospital seems like two or three lifetimes ago, and yet it also seems like last week.

Oh, wait: I never brought her back from any hospital. I must have mixed her up with someone else. She was born at home.

I’m happy she got into a good school, and I’m really happy that she’s happy to be going. As I write, she’s in the next room packing. I hear crackles of boxes being taped, thumps of boxes being dropped, a tinny sibilance from her iPod speakers as they broadcast her eclectic selections: It Was a Very Good Year (Kingston Trio), Shiny Happy People (R.E.M.), I Did It My Way (Frank Sinatra), Tea for the Tillerman (Cat Stevens), Trees Get Wheeled Away (Bright Eyes), Mi Ranchito (Los Super Seven) and some reel by the Chieftains.

As more and more things go into boxes, I’m able — for the first time in five years — to walk through her room without being aggressed upon by a stray pant leg.

Over the past weeks I’ve assembled goodies for the top of Lulu (Chapstick and shampoo) to the bottom of her (slippers and star-covered kneesocks). I got her Spiderman BandAids, a subscription to Mother Jones Magazine and sheets. I bought phosphate-free laundry detergent, organic teas, and an environmentally friendly, wind-up radio/flashlight.

Tonight we went to a departure-eve dinner at her favorite restaurant across the estuary. It serves New Zealand cuisine; sheep products, mostly. On the way there, there was a Stones song on the radio but … she didn’t know who it was! I panicked. “Here she is going to college and she doesn’t even recognize Mick Jagger! I’m a failure. It would be one thing if she couldn’t tell the difference between Freddy and the Dreamers and Herman’s Hermits … but the Rolling STONES! My work here is not done. And she can’t go until it is.”

It’s that same feeling I get as the Times Square ball starts falling on New Year’s Eve: That OCD thing of “Wait! There’s something I have to do first! I don’t remember what it is, but … WAIT!”

During dinner I kept my ear out for evidence of other parental duties I might have neglected and might be able to remedy by morn. In the meantime, I tried to give her one last sex talk, just in case. But she would have none of it.

The first thing I did when we got home from dinner was to make an iTunes playlist of musical essentials: Traffic, Cream, The Byrds, The Dead, The Band, The Doors, Mississippi John Hurt, Fairport Convention, Randy Newman, Otis Redding, Jerry Jeff Walker, Leadbelly, Buffalo Springfield, Clifton Chenier, Crosby Stills Nash & Young, Doc Watson, Bonnie Raitt, Blind Faith and the like. Oh, and the Rolling Stones.

[Editor's note: In the end she was too busy. I am ashamed to admit that I sent her off to college anyway, ill-prepared and vulnerable.]

Now, as she finishes getting ready I keep singing my own version of Lucinda Williams’ gently ironic song:

“Once you get to college, I don’t think I’ll miss you much… “

My brain understands that there are great opportunities awaiting me now that I’m “childless,” but the rest of me mourns. It’s been wonderful to have the orbit of this (mostly) delightful creature interweave with mine. It’s strange — unimaginable, really — to realize that’s all behind me. Not only that raising M is behind me, but that raising children in general is past. Now, when strangers see me with a young person, they ask if it’s my grandchild. So, not only must I learn to live without M, I must get accustomed to the idea that the world no longer sees me as the radiant, voluptuous, nubile and achingly beautiful sex goddess I once was.

Here’s a work of art by Mark Bulwinkle, which he just sent on account of its relevance to my situation.

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