A Daughter-Shaped Space

My life is full.  One would think. Work keeps me busy; my son makes me proud; my husband keeps me distracted and laughing out loud, most days.  My parents are aging, weathered but tough.  My days fill my head beyond capacity with the demands of work, family, friends, colleagues, meeting schedules and an array of volunteer and social obligations that make me belong and feel needed.

At least once a day, something comes my way – an image passes in front of my eyes while walking through the neighbourhood where I raised my children – the school, the playground; I turn the corner in the supermarket and notice something on a shelf – a box of cereal, of biscuits; I hear music, see a painting, pass a building where a dance or music lesson was held.  I clean out a cupboard and that special, blue Thermos, unused now for almost 10 years, falls into my hands.  I sit in airports and watch mothers and their daughters fill their time and space with each other. I envy their joy and wonder if this empty space beside me will ever feel such a joy again as when a mother and daughter can share a joke, or a drink with one straw.

Every day, everywhere, I bump up against my daughter-shaped space.  It’s a person, an object, a place, a smell, a piece of clothing, a sound, a colour.  It laughs, it scorns, it hugs hard, it snickers, it turns away, it runs towards me, all in the shape of my daughter, her bruising absence.

Sometimes it’s in a dream, I feel her beside me, with relief, with regret, with sadness, with longing.  She’s there, until I wake up and notice once again the empty void of a girl, the daughter-shaped space in the room.

I know she walks around in her life, where she fills that woman-shaped place in another city.  She has friends whose lives she fills; a workplace; classes; she walks through parks and city streets, making room for herself, maybe bringing joy and laughter, hugging hard the people who have her in their world.  

In conversations, people I have known for many years listen to me chirp with pride about my son in his studies, his crazy antics and wacky texts.  I know they can hear the daughter-shaped absence of a story about what I did last weekend, or where we went in the summertime. The missing stories of the girl who is now a woman, physically re-fashioned, damaged, scarred, and gone from my life.  The absence of a child who was almost everything and everyone that I thought I would need. Who left my life suddenly, with a gaping, angry, human-shaped opening, a dark spot of silence in the noise of my thoughts. My memories of her presence are now just a shape; her absence, her space, never shrinking, only fading in intensity, as four years pass since she physically left.  And the gap, the space, the pain of who she isn’t anymore, fills me in completely and defines who I am no longer allowed to be. She might have died, though she has not.  This grief is on a different scale than such an absolute loss; this one, ambiguous and misshapen.

She once loved me so much; she panicked at even the mention that kids grow up and move away from home.  She was unable to bear my joke, “Just wait, one day you will hate me”.  It was beyond her imagination to ever want a mother-shaped space in her life.

But here we are.

I know for sure that she believes me to be her enemy.  I know for sure that she surrounds her misshaped self.   What I don’t know for sure is how long this will last.  I don’t know what it will take, if, or when, it will happen that my daughter returns to me and refills the void she left, the daughter-shaped space, in my life.