“Have I told you my story?” my mother asks me as we walk from Jason’s Deli to her white spaceship-like minivan.
Her voice is soft and excited and shy. I am my mother’s youngest daughter. I am graduating college in two weeks. She will cry. She will say, My baby is grown now.
When I graduated from high school, she reacted in a similar way. And graduating from college officially makes me an adult. She can no longer think otherwise.
“No,” I tell her and keep walking to my passenger door.
Once we sit on the cloth seats and shut the doors behind us, I ask her to tell me her story. As I approach my unclear adult future, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what I should do with my life. I anticipate her words.
—
Standing in her beautiful dark green gown with a cap and tassel on top of her long and flowing dark brown hair, Delsa Roche thinks about her future.
Graduating from Baylor University with a degree in accounting, she already has a job doing the books at a nearby hospital. When she applied for the job months earlier, she had no working experience. Well-off parents gave her all that she needed. So when the hospital hired her, she felt overjoyed. As she sits in her seat at her graduation ceremony in Waco, Texas, she thinks, I should keep that job.
Graduation is behind her and the future is wide open. Delsa sees many great things in this opportunistic time. First would have to be William Stafford. They met at a bar a few years ago, and she still loves him.
Then Delsa would like some nice furniture and an expensive vacuum cleaner. Some things all of my own. She stays at the hospital, buys her furniture and vacuum cleaner. In a year or two, her and Bill will move to Harker Heights, where she will work at a CPA practice. Then her and Bill will begin their series of moves. They will have children. They will end up living on Delsa’s childhood ranch outside of Florence. They will be happy along the way.
—
Pulling her van out of the parking space, my mother talks of how she went into the job market, working in her chosen career field and made money. She had enough money to buy the things she wanted.
“But,” she says, “I never did anything.”
She wishes she had.
We’re pulling onto the freeway now. She tells me not to worry too much about careers. Do whatever you want. Travel, work at a restaurant, or write if you want. Just don’t regret not doing something.
At this point, I sit in the car seat and it’s hot and I point the AC vent so that it pours coolness onto the oil of my skin. I smile. I never knew what my mother did when she was moving on in life as I am now. I never expected her to encourage living so freely.
I take her words and swallow them. I want to, but for some reason don’t, thank her for making me feel okay about every thing that I have been thinking.
