There’s nothing better than a really good mother/daughter conversation, especially now that those twins of mine are all grown up. A while back, one of the twins and I had a wonderful conversation. We talked about everything from how to style a messy bun to painting our toenails to world peace.
No phone.
No electronic devices.
No interruptions.
A lot of heart sharing between just a mother and a daughter.
I was in the middle of telling him about my first dorm room in college and how I bought a moped and rode it around with long parrot earrings blowing in the wind….
….when suddenly she interrupted me with a question.
“How did you know you were in love daddy?” she said.
“I just knew,” I told her.
“Yes,” she said. “But how did you know? What made you sure?”
I paused, smiled and said, “It was a brownie fudge sundae.”
I dated my future husband (who was still my boyfriend at the time of this story) for nine wonderful months when one day he told me he was coming to my house to tell me something. I grew my hair out and wore prairie skirts and concho belts and super thick pancake make-up to hide the many wrinkles I had at nineteen.
Then?
Thirty minutes later, he stopped by with flowers and an announcement….
…He joined the Navy.
I stared at him in disbelief.
Navy?
what?
I was not ready for something like this.
I wasn’t ready.
I had already planned my life. I was graduating college and getting a job doing something very important and going to work in an office every day wearing super cute suits like they used to wear on Melrose Place.
And the word NAVY was nowhere on my bingo card.
So I told him I was out.
I told him I was done.
I told him I was breaking up with him when he left for boot camp.
And four months later, when he left for Orlando, Florida at 6:30 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, I hugged his neck and wished him well and watched him carry his sea bag over his shoulder. Then I went back to my house and sat on the floor of my room and stared at her picture and cried until her face became very pale.
“You’re better off without him,” I said to myself. “You have big plans and big dreams and a Melrose suit with your name on it.”
After two days I left for college.
Back at Baylor, I couldn’t shake the sadness.
I wore my melancholy like a prairie skirt.
It was pitiful.
I would spend hours in my room, eating brownie fudge sundaes, wearing pajamas and finding inspiration in the brightest font of knowledge I knew…
….daytime television talk shows.
I see people throwing chairs at each other and fighting and yelling, and people falling apart, and people finding their long-lost families, and people finding their one true love.
I couldn’t look away.
It was terrifying and inevitable at the same time.
And then one day—as I wiped the chocolate drip off my pajama pants and took another bite of a brownie fudge sundae—I had a revelation.
An amazing revelation right there and then in the middle of my sugar haze.
I was in love.
That drummer boy Who kissed me and left to fight for his country? I loved him more than I could ever imagine.
I laughed out loud with his joy—discovering that I loved him with everything I had. I loved it more than suits and plans and daytime television and brownie fudge sundaes.
Except.
Except I couldn’t tell him.
He was half a country away at boot camp.
There was no internet.
There were no cell phones.
There was no e-mail.
I didn’t have texting. I didn’t have a single way to tell him that I was in love.
And then four weeks later, on Valentine’s Day, the phone rang in my room.
That was it.
He waited an hour in line for a pay phone to talk to me.
he said, “Hello,” And I screamed, “I love you.”
My boot camp sailor laughed out loud and told me he must have known all along.
He was just waiting for me to figure that out.
And that was just the perspective gained from hours of daytime television, chocolate drops…
….and a brownie fudge sundae. 🙂
PS: He sent me a plane ticket for boot camp graduation.
Of course, he did. But he could not imagine The rest of the story. 🙂
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