Before You Go
By Joy Nicholas
@justyouraveragejoy
“Don’t forget to wash your melons,” Mom said.
It was early morning. We sat in her Volvo station wagon while a chilly November rain tapped steadily against the windshield. The car was pulled onto the shoulder of a frontage road just off Interstate 5 in the countryside near Sacramento. Smoke rose from the hood Dad had propped open, and the emergency flashers quietly ticked the seconds away. My father-in-law would (hopefully) be there soon to rescue my two young daughters and me, and we would still (hopefully) make it to the airport on time so we didn’t miss our flight to Spain.
“My melons, Mom?” I repeated, then made an exaggerated show of glancing down at my chest. “I don’t think I’d call them melons. Maybe lemons.” Everyone was quiet, tense. We needed some humor.
She gave a gracious laugh and said, “I’m serious. You need to always wash melons with soap and water. Sometimes they’re grown in fields with fecal matter used as fertilizer, and you can contaminate the fruit as you slice it. I read an article about it just last week. You could get salmonella.”
“Okay. But don’t worry. I wash all my fruit, even oranges.”
Mom was quiet for a second then added, “You really should read the Bible more to the girls. You still have the picture Bible I gave you last Christmas, right?”
“Yes,” I said. “Okay, will do.”
“You started memorizing Bible verses when you were about Jayna’s age, you know. She could do it too.”
“Okay.”
“And you need to give them vitamins. Maybe they won’t get sick so much.”
Headlights shone into our car. My father-in-law had arrived. I unbuckled carseats and passed bags and kids to him and my own father in a hasty transfer.
“You really should eat more whole wheat bread, too. It’s much healthier for the kids.” Mom was talking faster now, trying to squeeze in all the words. I tried to push away my growing irritation. It was time to go.
“Melons, Bible, vitamins, whole wheat. Got it,” I said. Then, knowing I sounded a little rude, I added gently, “I love you. Thanks for everything.” I kissed her cheek and dashed into the rain, but not before I saw the tears in her eyes. As we pulled away, I waved one more time, blowing kisses and reminding my young daughters to do the same.
We were the last ones onto the plane. Once we made it past all the glaring passengers and were settled in our seats, I leaned my head against the window, watching the rainy tarmac as the plane pushed back from the gate. An all-too-familiar ache lingered in my chest as I recalled Mom’s admonitions.
This wasn’t our first big goodbye.
When I was eleven years old and halfway through sixth grade, I stood on the platform of the station in Surat Thani, Thailand. My vision blurred with tears as my mother and little sister climbed aboard a train headed north, back to Bangkok, after our family vacation. In a few hours, I would travel south with my dad and older sister to a boarding school in Malaysia. The train began its slow, accelerating rhythm, easing out of the station. I cried so hard I almost threw up.
The decision to leave was one my parents and I agreed on together, and I was genuinely excited about it. Life in Bangkok was miserable for me. Every day, I spent hours on a bus, fumes from thousands of other vehicles giving me almost constant headaches, to get to a school where I was bullied all day. Even though I returned home late in the afternoon, my parents were almost never there because of language school and work. In November of that year, we visited my sister at the boarding school she attended. Far away from the smog and pollution of Bangkok with a campus right on the beach, it looked like paradise, and I felt desperate to join her. When the school administration told my parents there was room for one more sixth grader in the elementary school dorm, I all but begged them to let me go.
Mom sewed tags with my full name on them into all my clothes and bought me a set of towels and washcloths. She packed everything carefully into suitcases. Maybe she trusted all the adults around me to take care of me, or maybe she just knew there was more than she could ever say to prepare an eleven-year-old to live away from her mother. But there was never this blitz of information, of things I must remember when I was far from her.
That summer, I returned to Bangkok feeling grown up. I had learned a whole new lexicon of slang, and now I shaved my legs and wore a bra—to be clear, a “sympathy” bra for small-chested girls who don’t want to feel left out. But still. Every time I looked at my mother, I felt guilty, convicted of desertion. What child chooses to leave her loving parents for nine months of the year?
“Do you know that I love you?” I asked Mom every chance I could get, wrapping my arms around her shoulders.
“Yes, Joy, I know,” she’d reply.
“You know that I really, really love you?”
“Yes, sweetheart.”
When I was fourteen and almost died of an eating disorder, we moved to northern California. I spent the rest of high school with my parents, and after two years of college, I got married. Two years later, I had my first baby. Jayna turned one, and we moved across the country as my husband trained to be a Navy pilot. Then we left for Spain, where I had my second daughter, Skyler—where we were headed back to that day.
Why did she want to tell me all these little things now, so late in the game? Did she realize I had long since grown up? Wasn’t I doing a good enough job? What would it take for her to recognize my competence as an adult, as a mother?
Several years later, I lay in a hospital bed with monitors attached to my belly, tracking the contractions I was having at thirty-four weeks pregnant. I was alone and had finished my book and watched an entire movie while my husband ran our other four kids to and from their activities and fed them dinner. The uncharacteristic combination of solitude, boredom, and possible preterm labor left me feeling antsy. If I had the baby that night or if something terrible happened whenever I gave birth, did my kids know enough to survive without me?
My midwife walked in and told me that my perfectly regular, legitimate contractions didn’t seem to be doing anything. I was free to leave. But the question persisted. Even after I gave birth to my youngest child and everyone was fine, the thought kept returning with palpable urgency, like someone grabbing hold of my shoulders and looking me in the eyes, insisting, “Make sure they know!”
Jayna was sixteen now, leaving for college in two short years. The world seemed huge and perilous. Had I taught her everything she needed to know in order to weather the worst kinds of storms without me? Did she know enough to not be destroyed by them? I desperately wished I could just press a button and download everything, transfer the data from my heart and mind to hers—recipes, stories, important life lessons.
I didn’t want my baby to go hungry, be lonely or sick, or have her heart broken while she was so far from me. This wild, desperate desire to tell her everything right then was my flailing, last-ditch attempt to protect her, to say with my arms wrapped tight around her shoulders, “Do you know that I love you? Do you really, truly know?”
My mother hadn’t said much before I left her the first time, and then she watched me deteriorate as if eaten from the inside by a hidden parasite, barely treading the line between death and life. I wondered if, ever since seeing her skeletal daughter in a hospital bed, she thought of all the things she wished she would have told me. Once I had babies of my own, her mission became frantic every time we said goodbye.
Then one day, it was time for Jayna to leave. On the other side of the largest ocean, her college dorm room waited, and classes would start the following week. I stood with her suitcases on the sidewalk outside our apartment building in Korea and held her close one last time. We had hired our favorite taxi driver to take her to the airport because we didn’t trust ourselves to drive through the chaotic traffic with broken hearts. There was everything to say and no words for it all, so I just cried silent tears.
Sometimes, while she was away at college, Jayna called and asked for a recipe. Sometimes she called, crying because she thought her heart was shattered beyond repair. Sometimes, when she was home, she crawled into bed next to me so I could put my arms around her and listen to her sleep-breathe like she was a little girl again. Sometimes, though rarely, she even said, “You know, Mom, you were right … ”
This past Christmas, after a wonderful month at home, we drove Jayna back to the airport. She’s twenty-three now, and we’ve said so many good-byes. Still, after she checked in for her flight, I heard myself saying, “You know, maybe you should stop drinking so much coffee. And don’t forget to try that skin cream I put in your stocking. It has great reviews. You have those sanitizing wipes in your carry-on, right? Always wipe your tray table. People are disgusting sometimes. I saw this reel on Instagram where a flight attendant told a story about a guy who put his—”
“Mom.” Jayna cut me off with a stern look. “When you were my age, I was two years old.” The implication of her words hung in the air between us: “I’m grown up now. You can trust that you’ve told me enough.”
But by then, we both also knew this: when she didn’t know, she would ask. She would still look to me for answers, direction, comfort. I nodded, quiet, thinking of my own mother and all the questions I ask her every week, even with the many miles between us.
We said our goodbyes and hugged one last time. I watched her walk toward the security check, and just before she went beyond the wall of fogged glass to where I could no longer see her, she turned and blew me a kiss.
Guest essay written by Joy Nicholas. Joy was born in Bangladesh and lived in six countries before her recent move to Germany. Besides knowing how much she loves them, Joy hopes to teach her kids how to hold onto the important stuff and let the rest go, to make friends easily and everywhere, and to always remember to laugh. You can follow her adventures and misadventures through her newsletter, Joy in the World, or on Instagram. She is currently working on her first book, a memoir.
Photo by Jennifer Floyd.