Hannah Joins Mother’s Day Luncheon With Lala

Bonus late edition: I clicked “Publish” on this last night but didn’t click the second time, and so now you get this nice note about Lala a day late. Enjoy it!

Lala should be boarding a plane right about now, on her way back to California after a week spent in total adoration of our esteemed publisher. Yesterday, Laurea took her and Hannah out for an early Mother’s Day brunch, and Kina roamed the tables, offering wine and tea to everybody there, including the staff. This sophisticated behavior—and all of Kina’s rich four-year-oldness—made a deep impression on her Lala, and elicited numerous Instagram posts and breathless encomia in our living room later that evening. It has been like this every day for the last week, and I have relished it.

It’s been incredibly difficult for Laurea to be so far from her mother for the last sixteen months, and there was a moment in February when this week didn’t seem possible, and the distance began to feel like grief. We did a lot of coping and planning to give Laurea some sense of what it might mean to be with her mother again, hoping that the idea of her might create a space in which the real mother might slowly materialize. A few weeks later, Lala got her first shot. I want to be able to send a postcard from today to February Laurea, to show her the headlines from this last week and all the videos and ultra-cropped photos of Kina that her grandmother is posting, to celebrate the joyous normalcy of her first visit after the pandemic. I hope it would lighten her heart.

Farewells are never easy for the two of them, and today’s was hard, too. Kina, for the first time, showed a real sense of sadness at her Lala’s departure, standing slouched on the sidewalk as I loaded suitcases into the back of a cab. In the last few years, Laurea and I have often turned to Kina, in her angelic oblivion, for comfort in hard times—and especially at airports. Today, though, the three of them shared a good cry together, three generations of women who have survived a lot, but who have managed nonetheless to be in the same place, very loudly, for a week to cap a very long year—in love with each other and united in their strength and abandon.

I’m proud to be part of their family. I’m glad they’re here.

dad