The wind howled, whipping the rain against the den windows. On this angry winter afternoon, darkness began chasing the last rays of daylight shortly after three.

Eden, my four-year old, had been watching Sesame Street with me when she suddenly left my side. She padded to the front hall, and for the next several minutes struggled to pull on her boots. I waited for her to ask for my help, but she didn't. Mission accomplished, she yanked her red jacket off the hook.

"Are you going someplace?" I stifled a laugh. Surely, she would soon head for her playhouse in the basement. I would be invited to tea, served through the curtained window of her miniature kitchen.

"To Danielle's." Although tiny for her age, Eden's spoke with the assuredness of my forty-year-old boss.

My jaw clamped shut. I refrained from motioning toward the windows or saying that the storm might suck her all the way to Oz. Her dressing for the weather demonstrated some mature judgment I wasn't about to squelch.

She retrieved her Minnie-Mouse umbrella. Her arms, too bulky in the coat, barely could come together to close on the handle. Her sweater must have bunched up by her elbows.

"I'll drive you," I finally said. In good weather, the five hundred yards to Danielle's, was an easy walk, with no streets to cross.

"I'm not a baby." She opened the door and peeked out.

I could have used the vocabulary of menace -- dark, dangerous. Or, I could have reminded her that her sister would return from dance class soon and we would bake cookies. "How about a kiss?" I said instead.

She beamed at me, and her right dimple deepened. Her wet lips left a warm circle on my cheek. Her arms, confined by the jacket, lay for a brief moment against my chest. Then she pushed open the screen door.

I dashed to the phone. "Eden's on her way to you," I sputtered to Danielle's mother, and hung up. I threw on my coat, drew out an umbrella, and raced into the rain in my rubber-bottom slippers.

I stayed fifteen feet behind my baby. She struggled with her umbrella against the wind, plodding on, never looking back. In the glow of the streetlight, rain pelted on her umbrella and cascaded onto her foot-long back.

This was a rite of passage I had had no clue was coming. The baby who had learned to walk not long ago already belonged to herself, was already walking away from me into the dark, unafraid. In the storm of the night, my child was lost to me. In her stead appeared the woman who would one day travel the globe.

The rectangular light of an opened door indicated that Danielle's mother waited. Eden was ushered in, never knowing about the salty tears in my mouth.

Before spring, my nine-year-old daughter, Tomm, announced that she was ready for sleep-away camp. Her erstwhile passion for all stray animals -- including caterpillars and rabbits -- now a childhood fad, she wanted to attend a drama camp.

"Which of your friends is planning to go?" I asked.

She fingered my earlobe, checking my earrings. "No one."

This was the kid to whom I had relegated emptying the dishwasher when she was only two and a half. And she had never broken a plate. Why was I surprised at her confidence?

In the following weeks, as we sat through camp presentations, I stifled my desire to pin my beautiful child to velvet.

"Mommy," she said one night when I tucked her in and settled down to tell her the bedtime stories that were ours alone. She brought her almond-shaped eyes as close as our noses allowed. "When I grow up, I want to be like you, not a PTA Mom." My laughter had the nervous lilt of the guilty career mother. "What's a PTA Mom?"

"You have a life."

You are my life, I wanted to say. You and your sister are the center of my universe. But you test me. To pass, I must let you be whomever you want to be rather than the carriers of my hang-ups and fears.

But I didn't say it.

The pink backpack dwarfed her when I put her on the bus to the camp of her choice. Coltish legs poked above her sneakers, and her eyes were dark and grave. Only the huge yellow flower in her hair offset the look of a lost bambi.

"I don't know anyone," she whispered in my ear, as though the thought had just occurred to her. Her warm breath, with a whiff of her bubble-gum-flavored lip-gloss, made me want to take her back home.

"You'll have a friend by the time you get there," I told her.

And she did.

When it was time for Tomm to go to college, she picked the largest institution which had accepted her, and several months later took the five-hour train ride for student orientation. I flew in a day later for a parallel parents' meeting. She and I were to meet at the counselor's office.

I sat through the parents' discussion about the anguish of separation, the mourning over being discarded. All around me, befuddled adults agreed that freedom was confusing to their children -- and yes, dangerous. As astonishment rose on the horizon of my consciousness, I wondered whether I was missing a secret chromosome. The type of bonding these parents described seemed like a color that eluded the blind me. While I had felt so anchored in my relationship with my Tomm, my parenting must have been flawed all these years for neither of us to feel the angst of separation.... I hadn't talked with her since she had left the day before. Perhaps she hadn't even arrived. Maybe I shouldn't have let her travel alone, or at least insisted that she call. And what had made us assume, oh, so cavalierly, that the coming months and years would just fall into place? Suddenly I wondered if should have been a "PTA Mom." Luckily, I still had a second chance with Eden.


 

I transferred Eden to a private high school that nourished her insatiable thirst for knowledge, and where I could get more involved. But within a couple of years, she charged into adolescence and demanded to return to the public school, where the sandbox for her activities was bigger.

Five years later, on one of her college breaks, Eden took me out for sushi. She had decided to become a movie producer, she said, but only if she could make it big. Did I believe it was impractical? It was a flesh-eating industry, she explained, and she must relocate to California, but she had no connections. The easy alternative, she said, would be to make it safely in the New York corporate world. There had been offers for internships.

The dimple of the four-year old still puckered her right cheek. My baby still walked into the wind, still struggled with her Minnie-Mouse umbrella, pelted by rain, unafraid.

My mouth felt cold. My hands around the ceramic tea mug were hot. This was my opportunity -- my last -- to keep my youngest close and safe.

"You'll make it," I whispered, realizing that my job had always been to get out of the way.