Yesterday, 1/2/12, I took my daughter shopping at Forever XXI. She had a gift card. I had a desire to be with her.
At my age, at her age, the irony of Forever XXI is not lost on me. But never mind (at least for a paragraph or two). For a few hours, we were girls who just wanted to have fun.
When my daughter, scrounging through the 2-for-1 racks, pulled out a particularly garish, less-is-more outfit, the proverbial Outfit of outfits, and dryly said, “What’s up with this?”, I thought: we will find ways to laugh together for the rest of our lives.
The rest of our lives.
Rummaging through tiers of sale bins, especially those topmost bins, that my daughter is not yet quite tall enough to reach, digging out off-the-shoulder, bat-winged, ‘80s flashback shirts, the occasional flowered romper (what’s up with that?), and many, mis-stitched pair of jeggings (Peter Pan’s shadow, I found myself thinking; we just don’t want to grow up), breathing in the funky scent lurking at the bottom of said bins—of chemical-laced dyes and, yes, oh, yes, of body odor—I thought: this is what mothers do.
This is what mothers do.
My daughter turned 14 on 1/1/12. Tomorrow, on 1/4/12, I turn 50. On 3/13/76, when I was 14, my mother died. She was 51. My father began to take me shopping. He sat in a recliner in the furniture departments of Carson’s and Marshall Field’s, while, alone, I circled the rounders in Juniors, seeking the perfect outfit, the Outfit of outfits, the one that would both define me, and yet not alienate my father, who was living and doing his best, and my mother, who was dead and, I believed, watching.
14 and 50 and 51 equals Forever 21.
This morning, the sunset of my forties, I am doing math, trying to solve this knotty equation.
To be perfectly frank, I think it adds up to this: a part of me has always been a lonely junior, circling rounders. A part of me thought she would never make it to 50.
“She,” I wrote. Not “I.”
But yesterday, I was in the trenches at Forever XXI, and I was not alone. I was with my daughter. I was helping her. And (say it) she was helping me. She was saying, “Those earrings would look great on you.” She was making me laugh, freaking me out, defying me, thanking me, telling me it was time to go home.
I will never be 21 again.
And thank God, thank you, Daughter, I’m not 14, either.
She is. She is her own 14.
I’m 50.
