My daughter became a single mother this morning at our County courthouse when her marriage was formally documented and recorded  as -over.-    It is a role I never would have wished on anyone, least of all someone I love so dearly.  I had for many years, a deep and insatiable sadness that I was unable to provide my child with a childhood like I had.  She will say that she had a wonderful childhood and a very good life, and that it was filled with love, and she was spoiled by her aunts, and doted on by her grandparents, and that my father was the best father-figure she could ever have dreamed for, and all of those things would be true, but they don’t assuage my guilt, that I did not give to her the kind of family unit and family life that I grew up with.

Every June on my daughter’s wedding anniversary I would laugh and text them that they “made it through another year” and often would remark about what famous couple had split up during the year, and I would feel so proud of them, that despite their occasional troubles, they really were doing their very best to make the kind of family unit they wanted to make for themselves and their daughters.  My daughter got married a week before she graduated high school and didn’t “have to,” which blew my mind…that she seemed to want to attach herself to one person, at 18 years old, and not go out and have all the experiences that I so dearly desired but didn’t get to have…I had tried to be such a strong female role model for her and I think I was intending to live vicariously through her for a few years, as she went to college and lived in her first apartment and traveled to interesting places and did all sorts of fabulous things…but she chose to fall in love with a boy she met on spring break in Myrtle Beach and get married to him two months later, and off she moved to North Carolina, leaving me that summer of 2004, both longing for her presence in my home, and perplexed by her choices…

Ten years later, we are next door neighbors and today her marriage was dissolved and I feel both a sadness and a gladness, neither one was expected.  I didn’t really expect to feel much of anything, it’s not my business… She sent me a text from the courthouse, now that she had her married last name legally removed and is now going to go by just her first and middle names, Victoria Rose, and the text said, ‘Hello from your daughter Victoria Rose’  …And I wrote back, “Hello Victoria Rose,” and then I started to cry, at work, in a customer’s kitchen, …realizing and remembering they were the very first words I ever spoke to her when she took her first breaths of air on this earth, holding her ridiculously long fingers, and touching her face, Hello Victoria Rose…

In one moment late this morning I felt sad for her that her marriage had formally ended, and felt glad for her that frankly, she seems  just fine.  Both my son-in-law (I guess I can still call him that, I still love him, and he is after all the father of my grandchildren) and my daughter are happily dating lovely people, and seem very well matched with their current flames.  They are both young and attractive and have really their whole lives still ahead of them,  and surely that makes moving on, turning a page, ending a chapter, starting a new book,  easier…I have turned many pages, ended many chapters, and started many new books in my years on this earth…change is not always easy, whether we initiate it or just try to “go with it” doesn’t really matter, we just have to be open-minded enough to know that change is good and leads us somewhere new…I think as a mother I just felt so glad that my child was not having to go through those changes, suffer those jolts of reality, accept that dreams are often not coming true…but here she is, moving forward with the next phase of her life, moving on…

I joke, but it is true, that I am pretty much an ‘open book,’  but because my blog is public and my pseudonym of ‘RStar’  is now known to be “me,” because of a “sharing” glitch in social media two years ago,  there is no more anonymity, so I am careful, or at least try to be, to not divulge too much that is personal because not everybody with whom I am associated is as open as I…so I find that I often want to write about an event or an issue or a problem but I can’t…because many readers know to whom I must be referring…which is hard, when you want to write and all these words are in your brain, and they want to come out your fingers, but you have to stop yourself…editing my thoughts and the words that want to spill out of me is somewhat painful…needless to say/write, it might be time to start a new blog, but in the interim, there is the recognition that my child, this woman who is my neighbor, this woman who brought two amazing little humans into this world and who have filled my heart with the most inexplicable and unimaginable love, has turned a page, ended a chapter, and is starting a new book, and I want nothing more than a great page turner with beautifully rich character development, and a gloriously happy ending.