When my mother-in-law finally got the weekend with my daughter she’d been asking for, I thought my biggest worry would be letting go. But when we arrived to pick her up, one sentence changed the way I saw the entire visit.
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My mother-in-law was already standing on the porch when we pulled into the driveway, holding a sheet of paper in one hand.
Ellie’s bag was packed beside her.
“Now, don’t panic,” Diane said as Marcus and I climbed the steps. “It’s just so everything’s transparent.”
I stopped walking.
“Transparent about what?”
She smiled and handed the paper to Marcus.
He looked down at it, and the smile disappeared from his face.
Just minutes earlier, we’d been laughing in the driveway.
Ellie had appeared in the doorway wearing her swimsuit, a towel around her shoulders, and the biggest grin I’d seen all summer.
“Mommy!”
She ran straight toward me.
I’d barely gotten my arms around her before she started talking.
“Grandma let me steer the boat! Not really steer it, but I held the wheel, and we saw another heron!”
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“I heard about the heron,” I laughed.
Ellie had called us twice that weekend.
Both times, she’d sounded thrilled.
That was why I’d spent the entire drive to Diane’s lake house telling myself I’d worried for nothing.
Sending Ellie there had been a big deal for me.
She had never spent a night away from Marcus and me before.
Diane had been asking since spring.
Every phone call, every Sunday lunch, all the way through June, she’d found a way to mention it.
“I never get her to myself,” she’d complained. “I’ve got that whole lake up there and nobody to share it with.”
The first time, I’d said Ellie wasn’t ready.
The second time, I’d admitted that maybe I wasn’t ready.
Marcus thought his mother meant well.
“My summers up there were the best part of my childhood,” he’d told me. “She just wants Ellie to have that too.”
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Eventually, I gave in.
We agreed to one weekend, Friday through Sunday.
I packed Ellie’s bag myself.
Her swimsuit, two changes of clothes, a sun hat, her inhaler, and the stuffed rabbit she couldn’t sleep without all went inside.
I wrote the inhaler instructions on an index card and tucked it into the front pocket.
Then I texted Diane the same instructions so there couldn’t possibly be any confusion.
Friday afternoon, I hugged Ellie three times before letting her go.
“Mom,” she’d whispered, giggling. “I can’t breathe.”
“Sorry.”
“No, do it again.”
So, I did.
Diane rolled her eyes affectionately.
“Isabel, she’s going to a lake house, not college.”
“I know.”