Nine O'Clock

How we stayed close to our children through college, and how they took the driving over from us

Every Saturday morning, for years, I cooked before the sun was fully up.

Not for us. The food went into containers, the containers went into the car, and by the time the kitchen was clean my husband had the engine running. Then we drove to Manila.

That was our weekend, every weekend, for as long as our children were in college.

Why we went every week

When they left the province to study, the first thing I worried about was not their grades. I had taught them how to study long before that. I worried about what they would eat.

A student in Manila lives on whatever is fast and near. Instant noodles at midnight. I am a doctor, and I am a mother, and in both of those people knew exactly where that road goes.

So we brought the food. Enough for the week, portioned and labeled, packed into a cooler that would otherwise have held very little.

We cleaned their places too. Not because they were helpless. Because they were busy, and because I could not sit in a condo with a full sink and pretend not to see it.

But the food and the cleaning were the reason we gave. They were not really the reason.

Saturday night

We arrived in the evening, and the first thing we did was eat.

Not quickly. Whatever I had cooked that morning came out, was warmed, and went on the table, and then nobody was in a hurry to leave it. We ate slowly and we told stories. Their week, our week. A difficult professor. A friend who was going through something.

We wanted to know how each of us was doing. That was the whole agenda, and it took hours.

We slept late. On Sunday morning we heard mass. By noon my husband and I were back in the car, and we reached the province in the afternoon, tired in the good way.

Then we did it again the next Saturday.

Those were very busy years, for all four of us. That drive was the thing that held us all four closely together. A teenager away from home will not always tell you how they are over the phone. Across a table, after a good meal, at eleven o'clock at night, they very often will.

When they told us to stop

Both of them finished college. Both started working. Both started dating.

And then one day they told us, kindly and quite firmly, that we no longer needed to come to Manila every weekend.

We were at the age, they said, when we should be resting on Saturdays. They knew how to cook now. They did their own groceries. They cleaned their own places. It was their turn to visit us in the province, whenever they had the time.

I will admit it took me a moment.

But I understood what they were really saying. Not we do not need you. Something closer to we were listening all those years. The cooking, the cleaning, the showing up — they had learned it by watching it happen at home when they were in high school and every Saturday when they were in college. Now they wanted to do it back.

That is not losing your children. That is getting the lesson returned to you, finished.

And they come home

They have plenty of time, as it turns out.

When they call to say they miss my cooking and they are staying for a few days, I get excited in a way I do not bother to hide. The kitchen starts up again. The car is quiet in the garage, and for once I do not mind.

They always ask for something. Pasta ala king, a dish I invented that they loved enough to name. Nachos, made one of my three ways, and they choose which. The list is long.

Nine o'clock

In between the coming and the going, there is FaceTime.

Every night at nine, the phone rings. Every night.

We talk about anything under the sun. How the day went. Their work. Their relationships, which they tell me about more openly than I ever expected a grown child to tell a parent. Sometimes it is twenty minutes of nothing much, and sometimes it is the thing they have been carrying all day and finally need to put down.

I think that openness was built at a table in a Manila condo, on Saturday nights, over food that had traveled all the way from the province to get there. You do not suddenly become someone your child confides in when they turn twenty-five. You become that person slowly, years before, one ordinary meal at a time.

That openness is what makes my children strong. They know that we are behind them in everything they do. And they know that whatever problem comes their way, we are only one call away.

Parents ask me how to stay close to a child who is pulling away into their own life. I do not have a method. I only have what we did. Show up, on a schedule they can count on. Feed them. Ask how they are, and then actually wait for the answer.

And when they tell you it is your turn to rest, let them.

The phone rings at nine. I look forward to it every day.