Chairs, Reprised

The promise of green velvet

Not surprisingly to anyone but me, the reupholstered chairs will not be ready for my daughter’s move on Saturday (two days!). Everyone says it’s fine. And it is fine. I can bring them when they are ready. But.

The chairs, their un-finished-ness, their imperfections—I was as careful as I could be with the layers of wood stain, six layers (!) to get it dark enough, but there are still streaks and drips—feel like a metonym for the whole experience of becoming an empty nester for real. Sending my daughter to college was not tremendously difficult. I knew the dates that she would be home and for how long she’d stay. She still lived here, even if she wasn’t here most of the time. This is different. As a friend of mine calls it, saying goodbye to one’s child each time as they leave for their lives is “The Bullshit.”

“And how is mom doing?” people ask when I explain my daughter’s plans. Something about the use of third person annoys the crap out of me. Probably because it makes the experience into a cliché, something predictable and common. I mean, it is predictable and common. Adult children do move out, do start their own lives, all the time. But I don’t experience the situation that way. It feels unique. It feels like something I’ve not felt before. It also feels like something I’ve experienced over and over again with every change. I’m excited for it, for her, and simultaneously, I don’t quite know how to cope.

I keep thinking as I look at the pile of things we’ve amassed in the front room’s staging area that I am not providing enough, and I know that has less to do with the actual things and more to do with my anxieties around being a good mom. I do know, cognitively, that I am a good mom and that my daughter’s moving out and launching into the world is itself evidence of that. How much I will miss her is also evidence. I even know this emotionally.

But doubt, even just a sliver, is a bastard.

I want to give my daughter and her partner beautiful, comfortable chairs. I want the chairs to be, well, immaculate. Perfect. I want to have done this one thing for her exactly right.

It’s audacious, to expect to reupholster and transform a chair perfectly with no experience. It’s audacious, to mother. We fuck it up, inevitably. Hopefully, we fuck it up less than we make it better, make it good. That’s the thing to hang onto. The funky folds in the green velvet, the streaky stain you can see if you look closely, the struggle to do something, make something, grow and move and be, that’s the whole point. And the love, of course.