Whatever you do, don't see 'Eras' with your freshman daughter over fall break
Unless you, like Taylor Alison Swift, have endless capacity for gut-wrenching, blurry-through-the-tears heartache
The plans I had for my daughter’s first trip home from college were lighthearted and unintentionally but almost entirely female: a keratin treatment, shopping for chunky lug-soled booties, making watermelon mojitos from the last batch of watermelon I froze back in August.
My daughter was sick the week before fall break – my first (and only) child away at college, our first months apart, her first illness on her own (What do I take for hives, Zyrtec or Benadryl? Think it’s allergies or a sinus infection? Oh great, both!) – so the goals were pampering, rest, and recuperation before heading back to tackle her first midterms.
I had a B-list of things we might find time to do: a long, chatty walk (unlikely; she hates being dragged on walks); a nostalgic apple-picking and doughnuts trip to our favorite mountaintop orchard; an out-of-the-way drive to see the miles of pumpkins along 81 in Virginia, but those didn’t happen. She had studying to do, slept later than maybe I would have liked, and my husband had a work crisis that took up some of the precious family time I had been waiting for.
This is where I admit to things I shouldn’t, where I open myself up to merciless judgment: I got through my only child’s first two months at college by waiting. Waiting for the next time I’d see her. Waiting the five weeks between drop-off and Parents Weekend, and then waiting the three weeks until fall break.
It’s four weeks until her next lacrosse game, and a little more than five weeks until Thanksgiving break.
I hear the snickering tone in the questions from friends and even family about how I’m doing and what I’m doing now. I have good plans actually: a return to tennis (not pickleball, not that there’s anything wrong with it), an exciting professional project, and a few other cliche things on a list the culture has made for women in my era that I pretty much have no choice but to adopt. I’ll get to them, I promise my husband and myself. It’s just that my heart’s not in it yet.
That’s because my heart’s three hours away.
For her part, the keeper of my heart is having the time of her life. She’s taking advantage of everything, joining clubs I knew she’d love and a few that surprised me. She’s explored every inch of campus and a good bit of the surrounding city. Her adulting-era, you’re-on-your-own-kid time-management and organizational skills – the skills I harassed, harangued, and hounded her about throughout high school – came in right on time and flawlessly. She’s got an adorable squad that she says she’s not running, she’s just one of the girls, but I highly suspect she’s the alpha dog because her friends are following me on Instagram so they can see her baby pictures. She’s doing everything right. Flawlessly.
That should give me reassurance so I can stop worrying. Her shimmering transition to college should give me inspiration for my own endeavors. What, one might ask, am I waiting for?
I’ll get on it. I promise, I will. But not this weekend, enjoying my girl enjoy her queen-sized bed, showers without shower shoes, her favorite cheese in the fridge and beloved popsicles in the freezer.
We ended the cozy weekend that we both needed with “The Eras Tour” movie. I picked out the sparkly bracelets; my daughter packed a fleece blanket in her snack-smuggling purse (lesson learned at a frigid showing of “Oppenheimer”).
She folded up the blanket to use as a pillow on my shoulder as Taylor Swift made a spectacular entrance in front of 70,000 Swifties in SoFi Stadium near Los Angeles. I wasn’t ready for the awe, adoration, and gratitude that hit me. On the screen was a superstar who churns heartbreak, friendship, betrayal, revenge, and celebrity beefs into a phenomenon that moves the earth, bolsters local economies, and commands a glitter-covered fandom signifying their devotion with heart hands. And next to me was a rockstar who took her pain earlier rather than later (high school was hard) and was now feasting on her just rewards, slaying college. and having a blast. She’s more than OK. And for the first time in two months, a cruel summer and autumn, I thought I might be OK, too.
And then, five songs in, came “Lover,” one of Swift’s most beautiful, achingly tender ballads. It’s about a romantic relationship, of course, but the lyrics seized my throat and sucked the breath out of me while asking what I was yearning to know:
Can I go where you go?
Can we always be this close, forever and ever?
I wanted to kiss the heavy head resting against me but I didn’t want to get her keratin-treated hair wet with the fat, toddler-like tears rolling down my face. (It wasn’t quite 72 hours yet and, as we all know, the rules of hair care are simple and finite.) So instead I grabbed her hand and mouthed the only words that seemed to exist in that moment: You’re my, my, my, my …
It was almost two and a half more hours of raw emotion, of love and loss and emerging victorious. It was having my heart tugged and rooting for Taylor to find peace even though I know how the post-breakup songs turn out. It was eras I’ve lived through and eras awaiting my daughter. It was the story of all of us in that theater and in that stadium.
I opened my eyes way too early today and in a sleepy liminal state I searched for the source of the dread that wouldn’t let me fully rest. Oh yes, take-back day. Followed by an even bigger throb – an emotional hangover of Swiftian proportions. I had gorged from an endless buffet of feelings (mine and Taylor’s) and awoke wrung out, low on electrolytes, head pounding.
We packed up the car, swung through Starbucks, and headed “home,” as my daughter called it a few times over the weekend. She got to work on some chemistry on her iPad but first grabbed my phone to cue up “Midnights,” followed by “Lover.” I didn’t know how much more I could take.
The pain that was both organically generated and absorbed (mine and Taylor’s, respectively) needed to be processed or it would shut down my organs, I feared. So I did what any writer needing a mental break would do – I dove down further by reading Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s stellar profile of Swift in the New York Times Magazine.
In it she writes, well, so much truth and beauty about what it is to be a Swiftie, but that the concept of Eras (the tour, the re-recording of old albums, the movie) is “a woman looking back on her youth to remember what she is made of, not with shame but with curiosity and even delight.”
If to love Taylor is to love your own youth unreservedly, who else are you going to watch “Eras” with? The very young woman whose girlhood you can view with all the grace and love and wonder you won’t extend to yourself.
Can I go where you go?
Can we always be this close, forever and ever?
“It’s sad that you don’t get to decide to leave your eras, that the leaving is done for you,” Brodesser-Akner imagines Swift telling a fan-friend. “Time only moves forward. … You will always have to leave a place before you’re ready.”
Turns out I wasn’t ready to leave my full-time mom era. The era where my purpose is so easily defined. I’m in my empty-nester era now, an era Taylor, when it’s her turn, will embrace and romanticize and turn into something alluring and charming and, most importantly, marketable and sell billions of dollars worth of tickets to.
I can’t wait for it all, when Taylor Swift becomes a mother, if that’s what she chooses to do. I can’t wait for her to redefine it, to write about a love even she is blown away by, one that rearranges everything she once thought about her capacity to feel joy and love selflessly. I can’t imagine what the songs of that era will sound like, but I know they will feel like this weekend – like heart-bursting pride, like encompassing love for and admiration of a girl entering the first era she’ll call entirely her own.
You're my, my, my, my
Oh, you're my, my, my, my
Darling, you're my, my, my, my
Daughter.