Sunsets on Regrets

by Suzanne Weerts

Mothers have been saying goodbye to their children since the beginning of human time. And I don’t know how they have done it. Prehistoric mothers surely loved their babies fiercely and if they were able to raise them to the point of adulthood, say maybe to thirteen, they waved goodbye from the cave entrance as their child went off to forage for food or battle wooly Mammoths, not knowing if they would ever make it back to paint the story of their journey on the rock walls in iron oxide and charcoal. Certainly, their hearts ached as much as their hungry bellies.

My own great, great grandmother Flynn may have stood at sunrise on a Crosshaven dock in County Cork round about 1847, when mold was killing off potatoes, and famine, typhus and tuberculosis knocked branches off family trees. She waved goodbye to her son and my great, grandmother as they left for America aboard a coffin ship, knowing she’d likely never see them again and she never did. Much like mothers whose sons have left for wars through the ages or daughters who have followed their hearts and their dreams west to the prairies. There is always a not knowing if that face that is imprinted in a mother’s heart will come back home for one more hug. Another meal shared. A few more words of wisdom.

When I left North Carolina for California at twenty-two, I didn’t exactly plan to stay out west. I just wanted to give something new a try and spread my wings in a place and space where they couldn’t be clipped. I was ill-prepared to fly. Alone. But still, I ached for an unknown path. Perhaps, I was like my ancestors boarding the Dunbrody or Virginius, crossing that expansive ocean toward Castle Garden and the lives they would build in Brooklyn.

My mother didn’t come to the airport to say goodbye. Instead, I remember holding back tears as my father backed out of the driveway and she stood on the porch, shaking her head, her lips pursed in disappointment.

“You will regret this decision,” she told me, as I zipped up my grandpa McGrath’s old suitcase. I didn’t allow her words to penetrate my pores, and tightened my resolve to prove her wrong. Chances are, my mother’s admonition played a role in my staying. I didn’t want to live with regrets, as I know she did for much of her five and a half decades. And, now free of her jurisdiction, I didn’t want her to win.

When I was twelve, we saw Fiddler on the Roof at the Village Dinner Theatre. We loved it so much that we went back three times even though the food was awful. In the darkness as forks clicked against plates and Tevye’s heels clicked in dance, I felt a connection to my mother, but maybe more so to the daughters who wished to defy expectations.

Swiftly flow the days and swiftly fly the years.

I began to pull away, as kids are meant to do, in college. Then I bought the plane ticket for as far away as I could fathom.

The goodbyes at the end of my trips home for holidays over the next several years were warmer. Softer. Mom said she was proud of me for carving out a life for myself. When my family came to Los Angeles for my wedding, I think mom finally realized I wasn’t moving back. My friend Cynthia sang Sunrise Sunset on that 90-degree afternoon in Calabasas in July, as we handed roses to our moms. I was 29 and my mom was 50. One season following another, laden with happiness and tears. The following year she was diagnosed with breast cancer.

I flew home more often then, hopeful she would be healed, but always fearful that each goodbye might be our last. In December of 1999, it was.

I learned in that goodbye a deep sense of forgiveness. It wasn’t until the last couple of days that she realized the sun was truly setting on her life. We talked about her regrets. One was that she got married too soon, at 21. She wished she’d traveled more, like I did. She wished she’d had a career before having kids. She wondered if she shouldn’t have married my dad.

Hold on now. When I was young and they’d argue, sometimes I would ask her, “Do you wish you hadn’t married him?”

And she’d always say, without fail, “Of course not honey. If I hadn’t married him, I wouldn’t have had you.”

So, as we curled up in her bed on one of her last days and she questioned that decision, I was shocked. “But mom! If you hadn’t married him, you wouldn’t have had me!”

“Well, I’d have had other children and I’d have loved them just as much.”

We laughed. And I again vowed: no regrets.

Now, as own my daughter leaves for a year traveling abroad with her new husband and wars rage around the world, my maternal angst percolates just below the surface of my pores but I speak to her only of my hopes that it is a heart-opening, mind-expanding adventure.

She zips up her backpack and carry-on bag and I take them to the airport. I hug her goodbye, feeling her heartbeat against my palm and imprinting her soft cheek nuzzling my own, and though my heart aches like a prehistoric cave-mom or my great, great grandma Flynn on the Crosshaven Dock, my smile is sincere. Because I have a gift to give, and that is the freedom to fly, supported and loved, with no regrets.