I’m sitting on the couch, drinking a hot cup of tea, when my oldest daughter, Zoe, calls me on her way home from work. This is her first job out of college. She’s a grownup, living independently two hours away. Our conversation is fun and easy until it isn’t.
Out of nowhere, she drops some unexpected news. “Mom,” she says, her voice losing the lightheartedness it had when she was talking about ingredients. “I need to tell you something.” She pauses. Silence. “Josh got the job. We’re moving to Florida.”
My two daughters are my best friends. This wasn’t always the case. When they were younger and living at home, there were many slammed doors, four-letter words, and days without speaking. They needed me to parent them, not try to be a BFF.
Now that they’re twenty-three and twenty, this season of our relationship has morphed into beautiful friendships. I’m no longer nagging them about what time they will be home, the cleanliness of their rooms, or who they’re hanging out with.
Dara Kurtz
I had a similar relationship with my own mother until her untimely death when she was fifty-two, and I was twenty-eight. Learning to navigate the world without her has been one of the greatest challenges of my life. Her death left a void in my heart only my daughters have been able to fill.
The news about my oldest daughter moving ten hours away is hard to hear. I would like to say my immediate response was one of support mixed with joy and excitement.
It wasn’t. I’m not proud of how I reacted. It felt like time had stopped, and everything in my body froze. My unhappiness about this news was obvious to Zoe.
This all started months ago when I was packing to leave for my youngest daughter, Avi’s, mother-daughter sorority weekend at her university. I had clothing all over my bed and was trying to figure out the cutest outfits to take.
That’s when Zoe called, I assumed, to wish me a fun weekend. We do that sort of thing. Our lives are laced together like a beautiful tapestry. We talk almost daily and know what’s going on in one another’s lives.
“Mom, I have to tell you something. You aren’t going to be happy about it.”
“Is everything OK?”
“You might want to sit down for this.”
Nothing good ever comes from those words. I thought she was going to tell me about something that happened the night before or maybe even about getting a speeding ticket. I’m always saying she needs to drive slower.
Instead, Zoe shares how her boyfriend of three years, Josh, is being considered for a job in Florida. She tells me she wants to go to Florida with him, needs a fun adventure, and can keep her same job and work virtually.
I sit down on the bed and stop packing. I am completely caught off guard. I never saw this coming.
I don’t say anything for a moment and then find myself tossing questions at Zoe like a defense attorney trying to nail the witness.
“Are you actually considering moving to Florida? Why would you want to be so far from us? What’s wrong with North Carolina? Why would you give up your life for a boyfriend.”
I toss clothing into my suitcase, not caring what I wear. Being cute doesn’t seem so important anymore. The thought of my oldest daughter moving over ten hours away is heartbreaking.
I carry my suitcase to my car and try to wipe the makeup combined with tears from my face. I don’t do a good job. I’m a mess. I take a few deep breaths before driving to Avi’s school.
Somehow, we manage to have a beautiful weekend while processing Zoe’s news. We decide to compartmentalize her possible move. We wonder if it’s bad karma to hope someone doesn’t get a promotion. We decide it probably is.
Dara Kurtz
Weeks turn into months, and life gets busy. We don’t talk about it anymore because there’s really nothing to talk about. Why spend energy on something that might not even happen? I almost convince myself Florida is a no-go, until that phone call from Zoe telling me she’s moving.
For the first time, our relationship feels strained.
“Mom,” Zoe says to me one day. “I need you to support me on this. I want to move to Florida and want you to be happy for me. Instead, you’re making me feel guilty, and it sucks.”
Guilt. There you are again. I’ve worked hard to release the guilt I feel from my past, trying not to pass it on to my daughters. Clearly, there’s still work to be done. It’s funny, but not really, how our family traits and dynamics can pass down from one generation to the next, even when we intentionally try not to.
I know about guilt. I carried plenty of it around on my shoulders for a large part of my life.
After I graduated from college and married my college boyfriend, who also happens to be my husband, I moved to Chapel Hill, NC, where he had one year left of law school. I always planned and hoped to move back to Richmond, Virginia, where my family lived. Somehow, we ended up in Winston-Salem, NC, where his family lives.
I felt guilty for leaving my family. Guilty for moving where his family lived. Guilty for missing a lot of fun times with my family because of the distance.
The thing is, this was all self-inflicted. My parents never once said to me: “I can’t believe you aren’t coming home.” Instead, they supported me unconditionally.
Now that I’m on the mom’s side of this, doing my best to parent adult children, I have a newfound respect for the way they handled this. The guilt I felt didn’t come from them; it came from me. It was self-inflicted because I compromised on something I didn’t want to compromise on.
The truth is, I let myself down because I didn’t honor my true desires.
Sometimes, we make a decision, and we don’t realize the life-altering impact the decision can have on our lives. We think it’s just a choice we’re making at the moment. It’s not always easy to understand or see the lasting impact until much later.
Twenty-three-year-old me didn’t realize the decision to move to Winston-Salem would be a life-altering move.
However, my past doesn’t have anything to do with my daughter’s future.
It took me several weeks after Zoe announced her move for me to see this. Some of my struggle with her choice was because I wasn’t completely happy with my own.
There it is. The truth that’s been haunting me, even if I didn’t know it. It took her deciding to move to Florida before I could finally give myself permission to release the guilt I have been holding onto for almost thirty years.
Life doesn’t come with a manual, a ten-step guide to help us navigate our decisions with ease and confidence. Instead, we do the best we can. We embrace opportunities and push ourselves out of our comfort zones. We hope things work out the way we want them to.
“I’m not you,” my daughter Zoe tells me. “Even though I’m twenty-three and the same age you were when you decided to move to Winston. I’m making this choice instead of letting it happen to me.”
Ouch. The truth hurts, but I know she’s right. I finally recognize how unfair I’m being and apologize to her and Josh.
I would never intentionally want my past baggage to impact my daughter’s life. I would never want to hold her back or damage our relationship. Once I see this, I decide to support her fully and unconditionally.
I’m getting used to the idea of Zoe being in Florida. I know it won’t always be easy for me. There will be times I wish we could meet for a meal or a lazy afternoon just being together. I also know distance doesn’t define a relationship. Love doesn’t have boundaries, just as guilt has no place in my heart.
I am blessed to have a close relationship with my daughters, and I choose to focus on this. My daughters deserve to make their own choices and have my support, even if their lives don’t look like the picture I imagined.
I’m learning to trust they know what’s best for themselves. I’m also buying a lot of warm-weather clothing. I have a feeling I’m going to need it.
After being diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of forty-two Dara Kurtz left her twenty-year career as a financial advisor to focus on writing and speaking. Today, she has a personal blog, Crazy Perfect Life, and is the author of I am My Mother’s Daughter: Wisdom on Life, Loss, and Love, Crush Cancer, and Living with Gratitude.
All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.
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