Jennifer Thorup, 3, is the youngest of Nancy and Bob Thorup's five children, and she might be the last. Certainly, she would be a dramatic way to end a family, kind of like ending a sentence with an exclamation point.
Jennifer likes to play the piano, very loudly and theatrically, while her mother is on the telephone. When this fails to disrupt her mother's conversation, Jennifer slips outside and begins ringing the front doorbell.When they are 3, children crave their mother's attention. Jennifer may spend an independent half hour jumping on the trampoline, but when she is tired, she sticks her arms up in the air and whines. Her mom reaches for her, and Jennifer sticks her thumb in her mouth and reaches with her free hand for the soft skin at the base of her mother's neck. They cuddle. Sometimes, when asked what she wants to do, Jennifer will suggest, "Let's hug all day."
So she is as sweet as she is wild, and her mom knew she would miss her when she took her to her first morning of preschool this year.
"Be a good girl while I'm gone," Jennifer instructed her mom when Thorup dropped her off. "Go home and do the dishes." And, in fact, Thorup rushed home to take advantage of those two hours of free time.
But the house seemed strange. Thorup put on a tape, turned up the Beethoven really loud and sorted the laundry. Still, there was something unnerving about being there alone.
What Thorup hadn't counted on when she dropped Jennifer off at was that the lack of Jennifer would be so revealing. That morning Thorup got a peek at the rest of her life - when children were no longer noisily craving her attention.
She felt, she says, naked.
When you're a mother, your children clothe you with their needs: The hunger to be held and nursed; the need for a bath, a Band-Aid, new soccer shoes, help with long division. They need you to be their audience at the Halloween parade. They need to hold your hand at the mall.
Later what they need is a ride to the mall. And rides to basketball practice and sleepovers and stomps. And then, before you know it, your children don't need rides anymore. What they need are the car keys so they can drive to the mall by themselves. What they crave is your absence.
Bit by bit, the wardrobe of motherhood is pulled off and folded and tucked away.
Motherhood is about a lot of things, many of which will be extolled in mushy sentiments on Mother's Day cards this weekend. "Thanks for tying my shoes and kissing away my hurts," the cards will say. But motherhood is about something else, too: not just what you do for your children, but what you learn not to do. What you learn not to expect. What you learn to stop worrying about.
It's about learning - gracefully and enthusiastically and painfully - to let go.
Peggy Hatch has been through most of the stages of letting go: She remembers the last day she nursed her youngest child; the first day of kindergarten; two trips to get drivers' licenses; a trip to the airport to take her oldest daughter, Eva, to college. She was wistful about all of these.
But the real letting go, she says, happened when Eva turned 14.
"That's when they separate from you in a major way," says Hatch. "That's when they start fighting your values. That's when they leave, whether they still live there or not."
For about a year, Eva was consistently annoyed by her parents and let them know it. If they planned a family trip to their cabin in Torrey, Eva always chose to stay home in Salt Lake City.
Eva's insolence upset Hatch, but she grieved also for what the behavior signified: Her first-born was, with all the rudeness she could muster, putting her childhood behind her.
"She was moving away from a family-centered view of life to a world-centered view," remembers Hatch. "We became peripheral to her." Hatch, a psychologist, understood how appropriate Eva's rebellion was. That didn't make it any easier.
When Eva was about halfway through her 15th year, she suddenly and miraculously became pleasant again. The Hatches had lived through the worst. But in a way, Eva's born-again sweetness made it even harder when she went away to college, 2,000 miles from home.
This year, both of the Hatch girls are away at college. "I ache for them," says Hatch. This time around, though, it isn't their childhood she misses. "I miss them as people," she says. "I enjoy my children." Despite her ache for them, she says she never wanted them to feel obligated to stay in Utah. To ask them to stay, she says, would have been selfish.
Both Eva and Christine will be back this summer, and both are looking forward to trips to the family cabin in Torrey. They have made the journey into independence, with Hatch's blessing, and now it feels safe to come home again.
Hatch can look back on it now and see the bigger picture. "I don't think you can keep anything," she says, "that you can't let go of."
Sally Smith's children are 20 and 16; they're not totally out the door but are inching their way toward it. Smith, who owns A Woman's Place bookstore, is trying to be philosophical about it.
"What I always tell my friends is that if I had known my children were going to grow up and leave me, I wouldn't have become so attached."
She laughs when she quotes herself because she knows she wouldn't have done things any differently. And, of course, she knew from the outset, as all mothers do, that the arrangement was a temporary one.
Besides, says child and family therapist Margaret Thompson, trying to avoid the pain of separation by not getting attached doesn't work. Nor does getting too attached, what psychologists call being "enmeshed."
The more unsettled the bonding is between child and mother, says Thompson, the harder the separation is. And the harder it will be for the child to handle bonding and separation when it's her turn to do it with her own children.
It's a painful process, she says. But pain and anxiety about loss are normal. "If mothers and children feel the loss and talk about it, the separation will go more smoothly."
In her practice, Thompson sees teenagers who do drugs, sluff school, are depressed. At their core, she says, all of these problems are really about bonding and separation.
The mother's job, she says, is to facilitate the separation. "You need to give your kids a double message: both `I'm here if you need me,' and `You can do it without me.' "
In her book "Necessary Losses," Judith Viorst tells about a father who, when his son was first learning to crawl, would get down on the floor and crawl with him - just in case a light fixture suddenly fell from the ceiling. What he planned to do was catch the light before it landed on the baby's head.
The world is full of calamities waiting to happen; if not light fixtures, then earthquakes and viral infections. And if not calamities, then at least bad days: strikeouts, pimples, no date for the prom.
It's no wonder, then, that learning to let your child head off into the world helmetless and alone is the hardest lesson of motherhood.
Judy Blake has had to come face to face with her fears now that her son Jesse is 16.
At first, when Jesse turned 16 last September, Blake successfully lobbied against the inevitable driver's license. She offered to pay him the money she would have spent on auto insurance. For several months, Jesse agreed.
But Blake's stalling techniques finally ran aground, and a couple of weeks ago Jesse got his license. A couple of days later he took the car out - alone - for the first time. Blake lay down on her bed with her head next to the phone the whole time he was gone, waiting for the awful call about Jesse's accident.
Actually, Jesse did just fine, expertly maneuvering the Plymouth the two miles down Springville's Center Street from their home to his job.
Blake knows that being a single mother with just one child heightens her perceptions of danger and the dread she sometimes feels about her son growing up.
Mothers with only one or two children sometimes look longingly at those families of six or eight or 10. Maybe with so many children to spare, it wouldn't be so hard to let go.
But Lynette Butler has watched her own mother deal with the eventual growing up of nine children over a period of 40 years. "I think it got exponentially harder with each child," says Butler. When the youngest child turned 18 recently and left for college, her mother cried for six months.
What mothers discover is the truth according to Pearl Tull, the crusty old woman in Anne Tyler's "Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant." When her first child got sick with the croup, Tull realized she'd die if he died, so she decided to have another baby. And then another.
"But she couldn't give Jenny up, either," writes Tyler. "What she had now was not one loss to fear but three. Still, she thought, it had seemed like such a good idea once upon a time: spare children, like spare tires, or those extra lisle stockings they used to package free with each pair."
What we fear, once we've been a mother, is no longer being one. We fear being out of the loop of living that motherhood grants us.
Sometimes a woman who thought her family was finished will have one more child . . . trying to postpone the inevitable. "The mega letting go," says Peggy Hatch, "came when I decided not to have any more children."
Ardeth Kapp didn't have any choice. She and her husband would have loved to have children, but they never did.
At first she just had faith that she would be a mother. Then she began to think the test of her faith would be about learning to wait patiently. She was willing to wait years, though she found herself praying, "Please, not years."
Finally, she realized the test was going to be larger. Kapp, former general president of Young Women, the organization for teenage girls of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, learned acceptance.
The hardest part, and the one that brought the greatest gift of peace, she says, was being able to enjoy and nurture other people's children.
The peace of letting go, she says, is the same whether the hope that goes unfulfilled is caused by not having children or never marrying or getting a divorce - or having a child who turns out not to live up to your dreams.
"We let go of the disappointments and even the anger and the resentment," says Kapp, "and that cavity that's created when we let go is filled with comfort and love."
*****
Additional Information
i know where the bodies are buried in my house
and can whistle past
indefinitely before i sift
almost at once
the remains of a girl scout at nine
her green uniform folded
more neatly than when it was worn
the sturdy body quite gone
a turquoise bib recalls
the docile boy with oatmeal around
the mouth that opened, swallowed
despite sleeping eyes
lost her baby i heard then
in between those i kept
only to find the more they survive
the more i lose them again
From "Missing Persons" by Linda Sillitoe