Not About the Name

It really isn't, about the name, I mean.  My delightful daughter always manages to find a way to take me by surprise, and especially, it seems, when I am feeling just a tad more secure about our relationship.

By secure, I mean, I think she likes me.  I don't believe for one minute that my daughter loves me.  I have this impression that she has a mindset of what she should feel, so if you ask her, she will say that she loves me.  But to read her description of our relationship on her recent blog (which is, after all, what this rant is about), she is "connected" to me by the fact that I raised her single-handedly, and, oh, she lived inside me for nine months.

My daughter has somewhere in there a flair for life, and an ability to dance with words far greater than mine.  Yet her cold analysis of tradition, and why she wants to take her future husband's name made me sad.  Because I heard denial, and defensiveness, and rationalization, all that stuff that continues to rear its ugly head in our relationship at the most unexpected moments.

I believe this happens whenever we get just a tad too close.  The offensive situation this time was my visit for her engagement party, when we shared a kitchen pre-party as well as one side of a beer pong table at the after-party.  For me, wrestling with living the rest of my life without my family, it was a nice weekend; I was happy enough to have been there, but I have learned not to gush too much about my children.  They have taught me in no uncertain terms where they end and I begin, and that is far, far from each other.

She had already told me, face-to-face, that she planned on taking Nick's name.  Big deal.  I took my first husband's name, too, and then I grew up.  I didn't say that to her.  But I certainly believe that that is her decision.  As well as that she plans on raising her kids, of all things, Catholic.  Been there, done that too.  Not the raising part, but the being raised part.  Not worth the papal pomp.

But she did manage to hit me from behind when she wisecracked her intention to "nuke-and-pave" the rest of her name, meaning, my last name, which I non-traditionally passed to her.  I guess she anticipated this would put me over the edge, just as she thought the other two firebombs would do it.

This is the thing.  My daughter keeps missing the fact that she is grown up now.  When she was in high school I reserved the right to tell her what to do.  I taught her all I could.  And now she's on her own.

Which she keeps needing to prove to herself.

What makes me sad is not the name; those things matter far more to her family-in-law than to me.  What makes me sad is that she is denying her self for her new family's values and calling it independence.

I am now 60, she is a mere 23.  At her age I was waging war with all the values my parents held.  I had been married and divorced and struggling to find meaning in myself and my life, alone.  That has held me in good stead, even as I wrestle with the meaning part and the alone part nearly 40 years later.

I see my daughter, who has a free spirit inside her, holding on tightly to a traditional family, that does, in fact, have rules for their son to live by.  And he does.  And so will she.

It's not about the name.  The name just draws lines in the sand, if you let it.