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The night before Amy returned to Thailand, she and I watched “Pride and Prejudice.” She chose the 2005 version, with Keira Knightley as Elizabeth Bennet. I prefer the series from 1995, but when your daughter is leaving soon, it’s a mom’s duty to indulge her every whim, from movies to lattes, even if she’s in her 30s and a fully capable adult.
As always, Mrs. Bennet made me feel understood. As stated in the book and slightly modified in the movies, “The loss of her daughter made Mrs. Bennet very dull for several days. ‘I often think,’ said she, ‘that there is nothing so bad as parting with one’s friends. One seems so forlorn without them.’ ”
I thought, tearfully, that it might not have been the best choice to watch right before saying goodbye. The next day, I hugged Amy under the soaring wood ceiling at the Portland airport, knowing it would be another long year before I saw her again.
Amy has lived in Thailand for seven years, interrupted halfway through by a four-year stint in Oregon when she earned her degree in human development and family sciences at Oregon State University and taught a small pod school while waiting out COVID.
Since returning to Thailand in 2021, she has created a vibrant life for herself, speaking the language fluently, attending a small church, and teaching English to hundreds of high school students in a town of 10,000 in western Thailand. She rides her little motorbike to school and everywhere else, even up into the mountains for weekend hiking and camping trips. I follow her adventures on social media, admiring the mountain ranges that look vaguely like the views from Marys Peak in the Coast Range, but with a softer shape, and without the miles of spiky Douglas fir.
Every year, during March and April, the hottest season in Thailand, Amy comes home to Oregon for a few weeks. I always think of Scarlett in “Gone With the Wind,” returning to the plantation. Amy lacks Scarlett’s ruthlessness, thankfully, but matches her determination and ingenuity.
She tackles the big projects around the house and our small acreage, spackling and painting walls upstairs, weeding flower beds, and cleaning pantries. This year, she brought special ingredients along and cooked an authentic Thai meal for 50 people in the loft of our barn.
We also had fun doing all the things we both enjoy — a trip to the coast, fancy lattes and time to read at cozy coffee shops, rummaging through potential treasures at the Goodwill Bins, eating street tacos, making food, and of course talking about anything from politics to travel to the interconnected stories of people we know. We both like to grow things, and we discussed the lush tropical potted plants on her porch that the neighbors were watering in her absence, and my plans for my beloved dahlias, tucked away in peat moss, waiting for warm weather.
Her two brothers, who live close by, came over often to feast on rice and galangal soup and conversation. She flew to Tennessee for a weekend with her sisters. Soon, we were down to the last week and that impending goodbye.
When Amy and the others were little, I wanted them to follow their gifts and callings, to be like ripples spreading outward in a pool, influencing the world far beyond our little green corner of the Willamette Valley. I knew this might take them far away, to the other side of the country or the globe, so I also knew I faced a far-off day of letting them go. Somehow, I imagined it as a once-and-done event. They would leave for college or marriage or missions or a career. I would be proud, and it would break my heart. And then I would recover and go on with life.
It was as I imagined, except for one significant detail that had never occurred to me: I would say goodbye over and over again. Our six, who range in age from 26 to 39, have left, come home and gone again, for a week or a summer or a year, to other towns and states and countries, countless times over. It always hurts, a deep-inside constriction that makes it hard to breathe. I struggle to reconcile the truths battling inside. I want them to go. I would love it if they stayed.
To their eternal credit, our kids love and care for me and my husband. I have a feeling that if I force-fed them with guilt and obligation, they might all decide to live, if not at home, then at least close by. I could enjoy their company and conversation. We could go to choral concerts and garage sales, I would set a huge table for Sunday dinners, and they could help me clean the attic and weed the garden.
It would be wonderful. It would also be like keeping a caged parakeet so I could enjoy its happy chirping. Eventually, the guilt would eat me alive, and I’d have to open that door and let it fly away.
So I hugged Amy hard and watched her march away, into the bowels of the airport where I couldn’t go, and then on to Seattle and Seoul and Chiang Mai and finally to her mountain town.
On a video call two weeks after she left, she showed me the lush, potted ferns, monstera, and fiddle leaf fig, faithfully watered by the neighbors in her absence, on her porch. Then she turned the phone to show me the rectangle of dirt beside the house, lined all around with rocks, that she’d been digging up. Inspired by my enthusiasm for dahlias, she wants a flower bed of her own.
My lingering sadness at her absence was balanced by delight and a sense of accomplishment. My commitment to serving others, my passion for plants, and my daughter that we grew and nurtured have all taken root on the other side of the world. May her flowers bloom as prolifically as she.
