On Friday, I did it: I took our eldest up north, to see another university.
We set out later than I'd hoped. This is because eldest daughter has a problem with time management. I have a very slight problem with this as well, but next to hers it is as nothing. I am thus infuriated when she gets me up early, then goes back to bed herself, after having warned me to wake her up if she oversleeps. This way she can be sure of a warm house, hot cup of cafe au lait, and a mother who is fully compos mentis.
There is also the issue of grooming. Up until recently, our eldest has spent virtual ages on her hair, her make-up, her selection of clothing and accessories. Whenever we've gone up to Edinburgh together to attend our Japanese chat session, she and I have been the most mis-matched mother-daughter pair imaginable. In my servicable but beat-up shoes, decent but obviously past-it clothes and slapped-on-at-the-last-minute make-up, I make a very poor show next to my gilded lily of a daughter. Not only does she possess the beauty of youth, but her hair is a slick, shining helmet; her nails are meticulously polished and filed; her clothing is all state-of-the-art stylish, and her make-up is the stuff of glossy women's magazines. Never -- not even in my own youth when I was supple and svelte -- did I look remotely as good as my kid.
Amazingly enough, this whole dressing/grooming thing changed a couple of months ago after she attended her first applicants' day. She had gone to it in full regalia, but when she came back, she allowed that she had been overdressed. When I took her to the last applicants' day a few weeks back, she was horrified to find that she had under compensated. So on Friday, she was determined to get it just right: the perfect sweatshirt (brand new and trendy, of course), the perfect pair of trousers. The right kind of shoes and socks, too, and unobtrusive make-up.
"What about your jacket?" I asked, putting mine on. "Which one are you going to wear?" She has six.
"It's not cold," she sniffed. I stared at her: Oh yes, it was!
For the next five minutes we bickered back and forth about the jacket -- You'll freeze! -- Not I won't! -- then we finally reached a compromise: a windbreaker that could be bunched up and put in a bag should the need arise. (It didn't: her pride would not let her admit to being cold.)
This time we were armed with several maps, and my husband and I had been over the route several times until I practically knew it in my sleep. We did get off at one wrong exit 35 minutes early courtesy of my eldest screaming "Mom, it's this one! Turn now!" but we still managed to make it to the university in one piece, on time, not too badly shaken, and still on speaking terms.
My daughter loved the campus. All the professors were nice or quirky; the other students looked like people she might enjoy knowing; even the dorms, which struck me as claustrophibic, struck her as potentially cozy and welcoming. I loved the surroundings: green, tree-studded hills, verdant forests, and a loch on which people were already out, before ten in the morning, in kayaks. I don't aspire to much in life, but I love kayaking and would give anything to be able to do it even once or twice a year.
"Just think," I said longingly, "if you went here, I could come up to visit and we could go kayaking."
The eldest gave me a funny look. "Mom, if I come up here, I'm not going to want you to, like, come up and visit me all the time."
"I'm not talking about all the time; I'm talking about maybe once every couple of months or so."
Strained silence.
"Mom, people go to college to get away from their parents."
I had a sudden flashback of a night spent holding this stroppy young person as an infant with a high temperature. Of the eleven times she vomited in the span of that long, horrible night, and how the washing machine ran eight hours straight the next day as I stumbled about pegging out laundry and making chicken broth.
I could tell her all about that, I reflected as we drove home, but it would not make a blind bit of difference.
"Mom?" she said finally.
"Mmm?"
"When you visit do you think you could maybe bring some of your mabo dofu?"
Mabo dofu is a Chinese dish that my daughter would just about sell her soul for. "Sure," I said, trying to block the image that suddenly sprang to mind: my eldest, greedily accepting my garlicy, gingery offering and forgetting all about me and my aching desire to kayak. And then a road sign loomed ahead of us and I glanced up at it and forgot all about kayaking, mabo dofu, and my all-too-often ungrateful child. Dunblane.
It breaks my heart that the name of this pretty little town should conjure up such a sad and horrific image, but there it is. My daughter is sixteen years old, and here we were, out looking at universities. I know that there are mothers and fathers in Dunblane who should be doing the same thing with their sixteen- and seventeen-year- olds; who would be happy to have my gripes.
"You find out how to rent me a kayak and I'll make sushi and chocolate chip cookies too," I said.
