The Smoking Kitty

not exactly how I pictured myself, but what're ya gonna do...

Today I pondered two seemingly unrelated incidents:

1. My oldest daughter is a senior at a local Catholic high school, and she had her last all school Mass today. I didn't plan on crying even a little, but I did. A little. It was May Crowning. (This is a ceremony held during a Catholic Mass in early May, where we crown a statue of Mary with flowers.) I thought about all Anna's childhood and adolescent years, about her cute plaid Catholic school jumpers and braids as a Kindergartner, and how it seems like it was just yesterday she was learning to talk.

2.Yesterday, I ran into the mother of my childhood best friend. In the ten years since I've been back in my home state, I've only run into her three or four times. Two of those times, one of my kids wasn't wearing shoes, and those were probably the only two times any of my kids have EVER been out in public without shoes. So yeah, that's awesome. What are the odds? I haven't seen her daughter, my old friend, in probably 15 years.

I don't really believe in coincidences. I think God places us and others into situations that give cause to teach or learn something or another all the time. So it makes me smile when I can make a connection fairly easily about running into my old friend's mom, and my daughter's last high school May Crowning Mass.

When I was in junior high, my childhood best friend and I were part of a group of six or eight other girls. Within this set, there were pairs of best friends. Sometimes those pairs swapped up a little now and then: a classic symptom of learning to navigate close friendships in the context of larger social circles and all that. Overall,  Liz and I were pretty "real" best friends for most of our teenage years. She was an only child, so when her parents took family vacations, I got to tag along for a few years. We definitely had our differences now and then. Sometimes I look back and regret the kind of friend I was in complicated situations, but overall, we were peas and carrots.

When we were in junior high, our larger circle of friends had a few girls who were experimenting with smoking. In 1987, this was pretty cool. Smoking made you a little bit of a rebel, especially if you were an otherwise perfectly good Catholic school girl. In my case, I was already heavily embedded in the world of professional ballet, where literally everyone smoked. (You can't eat with a cigarette in your mouth.) So when my school friends started surreptitiously buying cigarettes, it seemed like a good time to give it a try, since I was likely going to end up a smoker like all the other ballerinas anyway. 

Here was the low down on our raging cigarette habit: my eighth grade friends and I were so addicted to smoking that we would bum cigarettes off each other for "later," or trade brands of cigarettes, sometimes during class right under my mom's nose. (She was our literature teacher.) See how baaaaaad we were? Once I noticed a boy catch sight of one of our little trades during class, and the shocked and mortified look on his face was oddly satisfying. My smug posture said: That's right! I'm a straight up rebel!

We would sneak over the wall behind the convent after school and smoke. I was completely incapable of inhaling, by the way. But I could blow a smoke ring, and that made me cool enough. Jealous? We went out to lunch and asked for the smoking section. (That was a thing back then.) I smoked in the car with my ballet carpool friends, who previously had started smoking. And they listened to Violent Femmes. It simply did not get cooler than that.

The details that led to the end of my maybe week-to-ten-day-long smoking spree are a little hazy, but it involved somebody snitching on us about smoking behind the convent. When I was caught, I totally threw Liz under the bus. I got really clever and admitted that I was "just holding her cigarettes for her." I really thought that would get me out of trouble. (I know. Amateur. 13-year olds are kinda stupid, right? I took a risk with my behavior, and then lied about it. Fortunately, I know now that the "do a dumb thing and then lie" pattern  is basically a way to stutter for help; the lamest excuses mostly translate to "help me, I'm an idiot, and I need someone to save me from myself.")

Well it didn't get me out of trouble. It got me in more trouble. (what??? I was shocked.) Liz was furious with me, and our little smoking group disbanded a bit. It was spring, and our school had selected a few girls who had the most leadership/scholarship in our classes to participate in our May Crowning ceremony. (This was a big deal. If you got to be a part of this procession, or be the one who got to actually crown Mary, then you were a shiny gold first place medal of a student.) Well that month, I made history in our school, as the only girl ever who would be chosen to crown Mary and then altogether removed from the May Crowning procession. I guess my little incident demoted my leadership standing.

I never smoked, or pretended to smoke again.

My friendship with Liz was eventually repaired, but her dad saw to it that I would never forget it. He'd always had nicknames for us: mine was Katie-Kitty, or just Kitty. Except after that week, it was "The Smoking Kitty." He also gave me an ash tray with two little boots on it that said "Stamp Out Smoking." 

Oh HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. ha.

After I was caught, my mom said almost nothing about how bad cigarettes are for people. She was disappointed in me, but didn't need to explain that. A day after I got caught, when she dropped me off at ballet, I coughed on the way out of the car. All she said was, "See?"

Yeah. I saw.

Most of my adult life, that story has come in pretty handy, mostly for a good laugh. I've always flown a pretty straight and narrow path, you know, except for that one week I SMOKED in junior high. (Who, ME? yep.) But under the funny part, there's the lesson about rebelling, the lesson about friendship, the lesson about consequences, the lesson about expectations, and the lessons about self-respect that I gleaned from that over the years. This moment of my life turned out to be more important that I knew at the time.

Here's the part where two unrelated events make sense together:

During Anna's last May Crowning, I watched her sing in her last liturgy. I watched her with her friends. I observed the way she carries herself.  Today, I saw someone who I almost didn't recognize. I saw a beautiful young woman, not my baby girl. I don't know her inside and out like I knew my baby. Don't get me wrong, I still really know this young lady, probably better than anyone else right now, but even though I am her mother, I am not her, and she is not me. She's also not "just like me." She might look a bit like me, but she's not me. Her mind is her own, her memories are hers, and only Anna will ever know what it's like to be Anna. She is not mine. She is God's. It was my job to prepare her for that weighty realization, that once embraced becomes weightless.

I think over time, we gradually discover what really ends up impacting us, and we don't always recognize how much we learn from a situation until years later. Sometimes those stories have really funny parts, like when you're 13 and your friend's dad gives you an ashtray. Some of those stories are kinda sad, like when friends eventually fall to their own paths, and then when you talk to your old friend's mom, you wonder if all you have in common anymore are memories. Maybe that's enough. I wonder what Anna's most impactful memories will turn out to be. Whatever they are, they will be hers. I hope I handled her most important moments in a way that reflects how much I love her. I can't possibly claim to know what those moments are now, and maybe I never will. But I hope she will. And I pray her lessons will be mercifully learned, and eventually cherished.