End of Senior Year: A Personalized 11 Question Quiz
You're a Whole Vibe Right Now
Your oldest daughter is going to prom:
with friends
with a boy friend/boyfriend/”Moooom, stop!”
with your permission
this Saturday night
You went to prom:
with your current husband
against your parent’s wishes
because it was one thing you felt in your bones was a normal American teenager thing to do and just because no one in our church did it, and they didn’t have prom in Serbia, where your mom was from, and all she knew about it came from books and hearsay, didn’t mean that you shouldn’t go.
because even though you weren’t allowed to date let alone dance, let alone wear jewelry or makeup, all of which you were going to be donning or doing that evening, not to mention the overt disobedience, you told your parents you were going, and felt so proud of yourself for not lying to them. Yes, you fought with them for weeks about it, until your dad finally shrugged — maybe because you were 18? — but your mom was adamant. “What are you doing to do, Violet?” he’d asked her, almost mocking, “block the door?” She had been steadily losing weight, but wasn’t yet so small and frail yet that she couldn’t stand. I was so hard on her in those last weeks, so defiant, so shockingly unaware she was dying. She looked from me to him and with her paralyzed-from-chemo-vocal-chord-voice whispered as loud as she could, “Yes.” I’d laughed and walked upstairs to my bedroom.
Your daughter’s prom dress is:
baby blue and matches her eyes
low cut and revealing
lovely, purchased by you (the mom) at almost half of what your prom dress cost 28 years ago — you had a coupon code and free shipping!
A and C
Your prom dress was:
black
low cut and revealing
lovely and purchased by you (the daughter) with your own money that you made from working three nights a week at Old Navy because your parents would never have bought you a dress for a prom they didn’t want you going to.
A and C
Your daughter and her two friends are having a joint graduation party. Do you:
ask a friend who used to work in party planning to help you because you don’t know the first thing about throwing a party.
defer the guest list to your daughter and her friends.
invite the mothers of the graduation party’s friends over to your house and sit at your table on a Sunday afternoon right after you and your daughter had a fight over responsibility and independence and freedom and obligations and she said things like “I’m a good girl” and “Nothing is good enough for you” and “You’re always on my case” while you said, “Get over yourself” and rolled your eyes and then almost laughed, lest you cry, because deep in your body, you felt as if you were the 18 year old, standing in your living room, saying the exact same things to your mom.
decide to buy sandwich platters from Costco and pray it doesn’t rain.
At your graduation party:
the unusually cold rainy May day meant the tables were moved into the garage, and the food your mom and her friends and aunts help plan for was served inside of the kitchen and living room instead of in the backyard. Everywhere you turn it felt like people were whispering.
never in your life had you felt more like you wanted to be in two places at once.
you had a pit in your stomach the entire time because five days earlier, your mom, already in hospice then, asked you in her raspy voice, “When is the party?” She’d worked so hard to plan it — and even with all you were wrapped up in, friends, boyfriend, AP tests, finals — you understood throwing a party wasn’t her forte and all her efforts felt like, to everyone, a good thing for her to focus on as she got sicker and sicker. You’d said, Monday. Then she asked, “What day is today?” After you said Thursday, you watched her count on her fingers, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday. Four fingers folded down. She nodded, as if in unspoken resolve.
when people came up to you to offer congratulations and handed you envelopes, you smiled and they smiled and some hugged you but no one thought you’d all see each other again in one week to go through the same motions (minus the envelopes) but instead of congratulations, they’d offer you their sympathies. You took their cards and when everyone left, you drove with your family back to the hospice center two miles down the road to open while sitting on the floor. Your dad read next to your mom’s bed and your entire extended family waited in the hallway and the common areas, because you had told them about her counting down on her fingers and everyone thought tonight was the night. Instead, she waited four more days. Till Thursday, four days before your highschool graduation.
T/F Your daughter will accessorize her prom dress with jewelry she borrows from you.
T/F When you were 18 and going to prom, you didn’t have your ears pierced, so you asked a teacher who wore clip-on earrings if she had any earrings that you could borrow. You didn’t want to spend any more money. She said she’d look, and days later presented you with a small box — earrings and a necklace that matched perfectly with the rhinestone belt of your dress. She’d found them deep in her jewelry armoire, she’d said. Only after you go to give them back, after the dance, and you tell your friends at lunch that she wouldn’t take them, that she told you to “keep them,” that she’d “never wear them again,” did one of my friends say she saw this same teacher in the jewelry section of our local department store the week before prom.
On Mother’s Day weekend when you were a senior in highschool:
you walked into Hallmark to buy a card and standing there you, despite none of the adults in your life talking about it, felt struck by a deep knowing: your mother was dying.
while looking at the cards you laughed and glanced over to the older woman next to you and said something like “Are these cards for real?” and felt embarrassed when she didn’t smile. Whose mother is always supportive? Always there? Your best friend? Where is the section for cards “from a teenager causing her mom loads of grief”? Where is the, “I just realized this will be the last card I ever give you and I feel terrible for how hard I’ve been on you but I love you more than I could ever tell you” section?
you bought a serious card and hoped your mom would read between the lines.
you hide in the computer room in the basement to call your best friend and tell her, “my mom is dying” only for her to make her own confession to you: she already knew.
On Mother’s Day, which is the day after prom this coming weekend, you:
plan for your family to go for a hike in the mountains
will likely skip church
realize your oldest daughter may be tired and grouchy
hope your husband finds a winery you can go to after hiking but even if he doesn’t, you will be okay, because you are alive.
When you start crying the week before prom, the week before Mother’s Day, on the day you had a fight with your daughter right before planning her graduation party you:
thank the Lord for therapy
journal and talk to your friends
apologize to your daughter for your part in your fight. For dismissing her feelings and not listening. And then tell her that you feel like you don’t know exactly how to do all this end-of-year stuff, let alone sending her away to college, but that you don’t want to fight through it all, and that you want to give her independence because you know she’s earned it but that she has responsibilities, too. And that you love her more than you could ever tell her. You understand this is all normal mother-daughter stuff — this individuation and separation. But the layering of her experience on top of yours, this reenactment event your therapist calls it, is beyond-words difficult. You tell her you want to stay connected through it all, but that you know there will be a natural push and pull. And you also tell her you’re dealing with this other part that is solely yours, and she is not responsible for managing the grief from your past.
accept you’re going to be a whole vibe this month. Likely until August. Or September. Maybe November?
To find quiz answers:
You can’t know the results until later, and you accept, or you’re trying to accept, that there is no perfect score.
The teacher and the jewelry. 😭❤️😭
Oh Sonya. The stories you didn't tell, within the ones you did. Wow.