Bonding with My Daughter Before She Walks Down the Aisle

In the run-up to her daughter's marriage, Margaret Mandell comes to terms with the differences between them, and pays tribute to her late husband.

Margaret Mandell, right, receives a kiss from her daughter Lydia at Lydia’s bridal shower.

We were never the same, child of my body, bone of my bone.

One year after the death of her father, Herb, my daughter Lydia announces her engagement to Jake. Who is she becoming, I wonder, this fiercely independent girl with a tattoo of a pig peeking over a heart just below her right shoulder? Who did I become during my forty-five years with Herb in our wild pas-de-deux of marriage?

This wrenching death has betrayed us both—a father, a husband: gone. But now, a wedding. Our girl has a chance at the happiness I once knew, and I, a chance to renegotiate motherhood with a child who was once the center of my universe, now a powerfully competent woman, tempest-tossed, tested by life. This wedding—a chance to get to know her all over again after she drifted away during her searching teenage years.

I want it back. The closeness, the 3a.m. feedings, sleep overrated, motherhood a secret joy. Just the infant Lydia and me in the cane rocker by the bay window, Herb’s carefully tended spider plants, succulents, and philodendrons, green-gray in the moonlight shining over our backyard pond. I watch her face in the near darkness, hear her suckling in the silence, kiss her sweet, downy hair.

Margaret and Lydia many years ago.

You think you can stop time. Three a.m., August 1984. Hold her right there. Give her every ounce of goodness inside of you, your milk and your time and all your love and she will be safe. You know you are far from perfect, but she can be. Is.

But no, she falls off the kitchen counter where you let her crawl, and breaks her collarbone. Herb blames you. You blame yourself. Her little body heals. She greets every day with laughter.

This wrenching death has betrayed us both—a father, a husband: gone. But now, a wedding. Our girl has a chance at the happiness I once knew, and I, a chance to renegotiate motherhood with a child who was once the center of my universe, now a powerfully competent woman, tempest-tossed, tested by life.

You and Herb dream big dreams for her. She’ll be a scholar, an athlete, a wife, a mother. But she has her own dreams. By high school she has dreadlocks and joins a rock band called Ten Tons of Kill Ya. In college she rejects the on-campus housing you’ve arranged and moves in with her boyfriend on his campus, across the Schuylkill River. You give her time, give her space.

Then she develops life-threatening, misdiagnosed anemia. You swoop in, stand by for her endoscopy: it’s “only” Celiac disease; no more gluten, ever. You pull back again, give her space to find new recipes, safe restaurants. The boyfriend cheats on her. She implodes, will never trust again, she says. You swoop back in. You long for the 3a.m. feedings when you could give her exactly what she needed.

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A new boyfriend, a drummer, calls late one night: she’s been hit, concussed by a SEPTA bus while riding her bicycle home from work. You swoop in. There is memory loss, extreme light sensitivity, headaches. You can’t fix anything.

Finally, one day, there is Jake, steady as a rock. Within the year, Herb becomes ill and tells the children he is dying. It is Jake who cries inconsolably along with Lydia that night, and that is when you know for sure how much love dwells inside this man Lydia will choose for life.

***

“Jake and I don’t want children,” she says to both of us shortly before Herb dies.  She’ll change her mind, we say. No, she won’t.

“I’ll never know my grandchildren,” Herb says near the end.

Still, I am sure Lydia will change her mind. How could she not want children? She doesn’t want to discuss it. An ocean of silence stretches between us, filled with imagined mother-daughter conversations we will never have. I try accepting her stance.

***

But now, that wedding. A chance for reconnection and redemption from the grief and mourning that consumes us both.    

It begins with a cake. Cake is not taboo.

Six am on a hot summer morning. I am driving into Philadelphia to pick up Lydia and Jake, so that we can head up to New York City for a 9 am rendezvous at the Madison Square Garden entrance to Penn Station. There we will meet the baker of Lydia’s gluten-free carrot cake for the wedding; she has prepared sample cupcakes for us to taste.

Trying on dresses.

Jake is in the back seat in his signature camouflage baseball cap, navigating me with his cell phone. In the mirror I can see the rectangular tattoo on his right bicep peeking out below his mustard shirtsleeve, and an “F-hole” tattoo curlicued along his left tricep, cyclist’s muscles bulging. Even-tempered and a man of few words, he is the perfect partner for my still bubbly, chatterbox girl who wears her heart on her sleeve.

Lydia, presently a massage therapist, is strong and lean in her maroon tank top and khaki shorts. When she turns to reach for the knobs on my radio, I glimpse her tattoo behind her right shoulder strap. She hums continuously. Herb loved it when she hummed, which was most of the time, but his heart sank the day she called from Amsterdam to tell us about her pig tattoo. He’d have gotten used to it, like the dreadlocks.

Still, I am sure Lydia will change her mind. How could she not want children? She doesn’t want to discuss it. An ocean of silence stretches between us, filled with imagined mother-daughter conversations we will never have. I try accepting her stance.

We pull over in front of Penn Station at 8:55. A young brunette in high heels and a miniskirt emerges from the Penn Station escalator holding a white box tied with string. She hesitates next to our car. “Um, Lydia?” She passes the box through the passenger side window into Lydia’s eagerly outstretched hands. Taxis are honking at us. Lydia unties the string and opens the box. A cinnamon smell fills the car. She bites into an orange cupcake with chunks of apple and buttercream frosting, passing it around to Jake and me. It’s a showstopper.

***

Next, the dress. We are girlfriends now. We can be girlfriends because I’ve tabled the taboo not-having-children discussion for some imagined future time. I have not yet come around to full acceptance of her stance.

Lydia and I are in Center City, at Anthropologie on Rittenhouse Square. The ground floor in this ornate building is all bridal gowns and accessories, furnished like a nineteenth century boudoir with Victorian couches, flutes of champagne. A personal “wedding consultant” bustles back and forth with dresses for Lydia to try on—strapless, backless, sleeves off the shoulder, plunging necklines, silky, lacey, skin-tight, flowy, ivory, cream, off-white.

I am snapping pictures from various angles. I send each picture to her phone, and to her girlfriends’ phones; they are standing by for comment. Later, she’ll select my dress and I will love it—peachy tan with a halter top and silver sequins. At the dressmaker, we will be fitted for sewn-in bras. Lydia will call our breasts “the girls.” I will ask the dressmaker if my bra could be placed any higher to give “the girls” a lift. “No,” she will say, “that’s where they are.”

****

On the day itself, we gather in west Fairmount Park: a ceremony among ancient trees. Perhaps Herb is whispering to us through the cathedral of those trees. I feel it. Does she? Right now our radiant, doe-eyed Lydia with her cherry lips and close-cropped brown curls waits at the edge of the glen in her cream colored, off the shoulder, clingy lace dress. I hear her giggle from behind the trees, all nerves and joy, laughter like tinkling bells, like when she was six. Herb loved that laugh.

Lydia and Margaret on the wedding day.

The music slows. Jake, who has shed his baseball cap just for today, waits serenely under the chuppah like a great heron in his bright blue suit and pointy brown leather shoes. All eyes are on Lydia. Most of all, Jake’s. The music stops. Time stops. My throat catches.

The dancing begins…My girl has just slipped away. Into the arms of a gentle soul with great tattoos. Once cherished by her dad, she belongs with Jake now.

There it all is, under a big white tent illumined by fairy lights in mason jars: live succulents, the gluten-free carrot cake for 120 guests. Each of twelve tables is adorned with garlands of ivy, its centerpiece a framed reproduction of a botanical rendering of a single herb: sage, thyme, oregano, anise, tarragon, basil, dill, caraway, garlic, mint, parsley, or rosemary. Lydia had found these prints at the Free Library of Philadelphia and obtained permission to copy them. Her father, Herb, is on every table, bathed in a palette of sage green, pale pink, and white.

As mother of the bride, I have been asked to speak. Herb was such a facile public speaker. I approach the microphone, stiffly at first. “Let’s take a moment to remember Lydia’s dad, Herb, who would have given anything to be here tonight. He was cheated of this moment.” I stop and look around at the faces in the room, at the ubiquitous succulents and herbs. Something uncoils inside of me as I imagine him beaming at the crowd, one strong arm across my back. “Actually,” I say, “Herb is right here, among us.”

Lydia and Jake dancing.

The dancing begins.

My girl has just slipped away. Into the arms of a gentle soul with great tattoos. Once cherished by her dad, she belongs with Jake now.

I watch from the sidelines, where I belong, as Lydia and Jake dance into the night.

They can still have children. But they won’t. What they will have is all the joy life yields when they face each day together. And that will be enough.