I love the unexpected. I especially love when life gives you a moment in time that is so truly ordinary and void of expectation and suddenly (or even slowly) it turns into a pivotal moment. An aha moment if you will, a moment of clarity and understanding.
Now, I never could have anticipated being thankful for the nasty cold virus that descended upon my house. As it made its way each family member, I suddenly found myself home on the couch with my teenage daughter, a shared box of tissues between us.
Television remote in hand, we found the movie Spanglish about to start. I knew that I had seen it before but honestly my recollection of movies is sad at best. I remember saying something like, let’s watch it, I think it’s pretty good or at least funny. (A little sidebar from this post. If you have not seen this movie I highly recommend it. As a middle age parent, I think I related to every character at some point, even the drunken grandmother. I included the trailer at the bottom of this post…let me know what you think.)
By the end of the movie the tissues were for much more than our runny noses. You see the end of the movie is a seen between a teenage daughter fighting fiercely for her independence and friendships. She tries to shame her mother by screaming at her on the way to their bus stop. When the mother tries to reason with her, the daughter stops her mom by saying “I need space.” The aha moment for me was the response from her mother when she says, “There is no space between us!”
The movie is narrated by the daughter as she writes her admission essay for college. In the end she writes about “being her mother’s daughter ~ there is no space between us.”
At first I struggled with this concept because as a parent we worry about our children’s development and independence, “when to push them… when to back them”. If there is “no space between us”, does that mean she is not her own person? Is she not living her own life?”
It has been several months since I saw the movie and have mulled over its message. I am proud to be my mother’s daughter with all her strengths and weaknesses, it is her blood that courses through my veins, and I am proud. I am not a perfect mother but it is my blood (sweat and tears) that courses through my children’s veins and for that, I am proud. “No space between us ~ I am my mother’s daughter”, I thought that this was wrong, until I realized it was oh so right.
I would like to thank the cold that put life on hold and allowed me to watch this movie. More importantly, I am grateful to have watched it with my daughter for whom I am absolutely certain, no matter where life takes her, there will be no space between us.