Permission To Choose The Wrong Thing

By Jennifer Batchelor
@jennbatchelor

When I was 19, I walked away from everything for a boy. We’d been dating long-distance for roughly six months—he lived outside of Ann Arbor, he was my first ever boyfriend, and I was going to move because it was love. We’d spent a total of three weeks together in person; the bulk of our relationship involved AOL Instant Messenger and phone calls using calling cards back when “long-distance” equaled expensive. Moving meant giving up a full academic scholarship at The University of Tennessee to attend a community college until I established Michigan residency. 

It was, on paper, unequivocally the worst choice I could possibly make. At the time, I thought it was adventurous and romantic, but I was 19. What did I know?

I lasted six months before admitting I actually didn’t love the boy I’d moved for. Also, while Michigan might be delightful in June, it is for sure not that come December—ours couldn’t be the first romance brought to its knees by a Midwestern winter.

I made it through my midterm exams, but as soon as the last one was done I broke up with my boyfriend. It was a Wednesday night; the next morning, my brother flew into the Detroit airport, I picked him up, and he drove me home to Nashville for Christmas. After the holidays, I went to Knoxville and re-registered myself for the spring semester (that I’d now be paying full price for) and found an apartment. Then, I made my way to Michigan with my parents. We packed up my apartment while it was 16 degrees and snowing on a miserable January day and were headed south before dark.

The 19 years between then and now have dulled many of my memories, but I can recall a handful of moments with exacting detail. I remember the way my (suddenly ex-) boyfriend threw a framed picture of us against the wall when I told him I was leaving; I stepped over the shards of glass as I walked out the door. I remember the look on my brother’s face as he walked toward me at the arrivals gate of DTW and how he hugged me until I stopped crying.

But I can recount very little about the conversations I had with my parents. I don’t remember telling them I wanted to move or what their initial reaction was. I couldn’t tell you if we argued about it or not; I don’t know if there was crying or raised voices. It seems like there would have to have been, right? I mean, what kind of parent stands by and lets their child make a stupid decision like throwing away an academic scholarship and moving 500 miles for a boy she barely knows?

It would be years before I realized what I affectionately refer to as the dumbest thing I’ve ever done cost my parents. And I don’t mean in dollars and cents, but the emotional toll. Like so many other things, I think it probably took becoming a parent myself to see the situation from their side, and when I finally did, I only had one question for them.

How on earth did you let me go?

I actually asked it once, to my mom, in exactly those words. We were over for dinner one night, and she and I were talking in the kitchen as I washed fruit and she assembled salads, my children playing in the next room. And she laughed and looked at me and said, “Jennifer, I’ve got one question for you. Could we have stopped you from going?”

I started to say what are you talking about, of course you could’ve stopped me when I realized … they couldn’t have. I was young and stubborn and foolish and even if they’d flat out forbidden it and refused to help me in any way, I still would’ve gone.

My mom waited, a knowing look in her eyes.

“No,” I admitted. “You couldn’t.”

“Exactly,” she said. “You were going to go, so for us the only question was how you were going to go. We decided that the relationship mattered more than the rightness, and so we held our tongues to preserve the relationship.”

“But you knew I’d be coming back home, didn’t you?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t say that I knew it, but Jennifer, I prayed it every single day,” my mom answered. I nodded, glancing into the living room as my daughter let out a peal of laughter. Then I looked back at my mom.

“But how do you do that?” I pressed. “How do you let your kid make the wrong choice?”

She sighed.

“Practice. Patience.” She slid the sliced avocados onto the waiting salad bowls. “And a lot of prayer.”

***

There is a particularly regional trend in the South when it comes to little girls and their wardrobes. Big bows, monograms, an emphasis on paisley prints and seersucker. It’s a very specific aesthetic, and it’s one my daughter has had zero interest in subscribing to since birth. As a baby, you could not keep a headband or bow in her hair without her ripping it out in 30 seconds. As a toddler, she refused dresses and anything that didn’t have an elastic waistband. And now, as a six-year-old, her style can best be described as Punky Brewster redux: the more colors and patterns she wears at once, the better as far as she’s concerned. She feels very strongly about anything animal printed or sequined, less strongly about seasonal appropriateness or things like “coordinating separates.”

She knows exactly what she wants to wear on any given day. And, outside the very rare occasion (a funeral, an important family event), I let her. She wears her Wonder Woman costume to the grocery store and last year’s Christmas dress to the playground. It has to be clean and it has to fit, but other than that, she’s free to wear more or less whatever she wants without condition. She wore her Halloween costume (the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters, lest you picture something event-appropriate) to the Easter egg hunt at my parents’ a few weeks ago.

At first blush, giving my first grader free range over her wardrobe has absolutely nothing to do with my mom letting me move to Michigan. After all, I’m not saying that Ellie’s sartorial choices are wrong, necessarily. A visual assault on your senses, sure, but aggressive pattern combining isn’t a choice that’s going to have any long term negative ramifications. It’s certainly not, oh, let’s say, throwing-away-a-scholarship-and-moving-500-miles-for-a guy-you-barely-know on the continuum of “choices you’ll later regret.”

It’s low stakes stuff, in the grand scheme of things. 

But it is practice. In giving up control, in paying attention to what brings my daughter joy, in understanding what’s a mountain and what’s a molehill and not mixing up the two. As the stakes rise and the choices get bigger, hopefully muscle memory will kick in and I’ll remember what’s mine to choose. I get to choose to love her. Support her. And she gets to choose everything else. 

Because someday, my daughter will be 19 and about to pick the wrong thing. And I’ll be faced with my own choice—between being right and the relationship. 

In theory, the call sounds easy. In practice, it’s enough to break your heart.

***

There’s one more thing I remember in vivid detail about my ill-fated move to Michigan. After I ended things, when my brother and I walked in the door after the long drive home, my mom was waiting. My head was down and I was full of shame—I’d blown up my life, and I had no one to blame but myself. I was braced for at least some light teasing, if not a full on scolding, but there was none of that. She didn’t ask how the drive was or tell me how tired I looked. There was no “I told you so” or “if only you had listened.” 

My mom just opened her arms and held me tight. “Welcome home,” was all she whispered in my ear.

To this day, she’s never asked me what I was thinking. I’ve asked plenty of times how she could let me go, but she’s never asked why I chose to go in the first place. And I don’t think it’s because she doesn’t care, but because it doesn’t matter. 

The only thing that’s ever mattered was that she was waiting for me when I was ready to come back home.