“Don’t get old on me, Mama!” my daughter used to chide me. My Sarah, in high school at that time, has always known just how to get my attention, and she does.

What I heard her saying to me was, “Mama, I want you vibrant and present in my life.” Sarah confronts two aspects of how I choose to, or choose not to, connect with those I love. She has always needed to connect with my aliveness. She has always wanted me to be fully present in her life, in the moment, in her moment.

That doesn’t seem like alot for a child to request of a parent, yet it calls into question every choice I make about how I choose to connect to the world and to those persons in my world. My choice touched Sarah’s life on every level.

Show me your aliveness, Mama. Show me the vitality of your passion, the delight you take in experiencing, the richness of your friendships, the fun you have in choosing color and fragrance and feel of everything you pull into your life. Let me connect up with and experience in you all the possibilities that lie ahead for me as a woman, in terms of personal power, in terms of desire and fulfillment, in terms of generativity and joy.

If you don’t do that in your lifetime, Mama, I will have to make up in mine for your lack. I will have to get, do, achieve all the things you didn’t. I will have to run harder, do more, stir up more energy, take more risks, for I will have to balance, compensate, live out your unlived life. Let me have my own life, Mama, to make my own choices, for me. Don’t ask me to do what you chose not to do with yours. Keep passion alive or I’ll have to do it all.

Give me your presence, Mama. I need you focused and awake. I need you in concert with the earth beneath you, the cosmos around you, the breath within you. I need you to be with me when you’re with me, planted right here on the earth, not preoccupied, not distracted, not wishing you were somewhere else. I need to feel your energy, to indulge myself in the warm pulse of your loving, to bask in your delight of me.

I need to see in your eyes the world embracing me. If I can’t find these things in you, Mama, I will have to race through life with a knawing hunger that will blind me to everything that doesn’t sing my praises. I will have to do and do and do until I think I’ve lulled everyone into believing I’m special. I will not be free to rest in the gentle presence of who I am. I will gag on the pain of my own self doubts.

I’m watching you, Mama. I’m watching every wrinkle, every smile, every yes, every no. I’m watching how you hold me close and let me slowly move away. I’m right over here, soaking you in with my heart, learning from you, needing you to love the journey all the while you’re letting it go. I stand on your shoulders. You are my stand on the earth. When you’re gone, I need to know how to stand by my self, to hold this world close, to love it, then to let it go. I’m watching you, Mama. I’ve always watched you.

Children know in-utero whether we are present, available, anxious, vitally alive. They absorb our emotional, spiritual, intellectual energies, know intuitively if they are wanted by us. They know us at our depths before we know them. We cannot trick them as we might bluff the world. Children are our truth keepers.

For me, for Sarah, and for all the Sarah’s after her, I want to be young in spirit and old in soul. Spirit soars: I want my energies up, my ideas young, my spirits light. Soul digs down: I want my wisdom deep, my presence grounded, and all my chosen connections, strong and vital. I want the awareness and the wisdom it takes to allow, to enjoy, and to mentor my children through all the adventures and stages they need. Soul gets more rich with the years. Spirit gets more free.

Sarah’s invitation to me to remain vital, present, and involved in her life, has pulled me out of foxholes and quicksand more than I can tell. She has held me to the earth. This has served as gift for the both of us. Her vitality and voracious passion for life and color and relationship have stirred my own. My delight in her, my commitment to being there for her, my respect of her emerging womanhood, have been nurturance for her. The universe must have known.