N.O.M.B.

I came up with this acronym a few years ago when I was trying unsuccessfully to separate from my post-college, capable, adult daughters. They had already separated from me! But the maternal instinct dies hard, at least the part of it that feels the need to protect one’s offspring from harm of any kind. High school driving, drinking, drugs, and sex; college driving, drinking, drugs, and sex; rude comments, foul language (but who am I to talk), and outright defiance of my fear-addled advice as well as the more everyday eyerolls of disdain and embarrassment — I did not take any of this with a grain of salt, unless you count the many in my martyred tears. In my daily journal, I scrawled pages of painful prose, struggling to stay out of their business, to let them make their own mistakes and not rush in to rescue them from what I considered poor decisions. I went to a 12 step program and started seeing a therapist. These helped. I began to realize that my daughters’ lives were not mine, and that I was not their higher power, as much as I secretly wanted to be. I could not nor should not protect them without stunting their growth, and also my own. The details of their lives belonged to them. How they lived their lives was up to them. It was N.O.M.B.! None Of My Business! That is what I tell myself whenever I am tempted to ask them too many questions and not give them the space to share what they choose to tell me. And the more I say it, the more I feel strangely liberated from the need to know and the need to be needed. I breathe the air of my own independent self, someone I’m thrilled to know is still there after all these years. And then the cellphone rings and one of them says, “Mom, can I just vent a little?” “Sure,” I say, and I sit down to listen. Just listen.