18 Years

I recently listened to the actor James Marsden interviewed about his new project, a show called “Jury Duty,” in which someone believes he is called to serve on a real jury, but the whole thing is staged, and everyone else is an actor. Part of the set-up that explains the director and the cameras is that they are supposedly filming a documentary about how the court system works. At the end of two weeks and the conclusion of a trial that one person thinks is real and everyone else knows is fake, there is a big reveal where the unsuspecting non-actor finds out he’s been tricked, and they give him $100,000. Marsden explains that behind the scenes everyone was working to orchestrate a hero’s journey narrative and make this guy, who easily could have felt humiliated, feel instead like the star of the show.

Since listening to that interview, I have been reflecting on the way we parents try to direct our children’s lives and script their hero’s journeys. Since my only child is galloping through end-of-senior-year events on her way to leaving home for college in the fall, I’ve also been thinking about the big reveal: Surprise! You can’t stay here being the star of the show! There won’t always be lights and cameras and people following you around asking you what you think. Somehow, though, it feels like we’ve both been punked.

Recently she asked me to make her not one, but two, gourmet cakes for her 18th birthday party on Sunday. I said, “Sure.” I’m a fan of the grand gesture. More is more is my motto.

“Your Best Mom Award is in the works,” she said.

“What, I don’t get it now?”

“Well, your job’s not done.”

“Oh, I just stop being your mom when you turn 18?” I said.

“You wish,” she snorted, and we both laughed.

I don’t wish, even though she’s invited 55 of her closest friends to our house in two days.

I guess I should feel good that she thinks I’m capable of that level of entertaining and baking.

My dad says that I am the victim of my own omnicompetence.

But parenting makes you feel anything but omnicompetent, doesn’t it? As the date of her departure looms in three short months, I have felt a slug’s trail of shame sludge making its way through me, splotching onto the page as I cry my way through various writing groups, even when I describe my daughter in the most unsentimental terms. I had wanted to be a better parent, and now it feels too late.

I recently found a piece of paper with little newborn footprints on it given to us at the hospital, reminding me of my daughter’s tiny feet and her tiny fingers and pudgy soft hands with no knuckles. That was almost exactly 18 years ago, and now, weirdly, there is a walking, talking, fully knuckled human in my daughter’s bedroom. She will cross the stage of the Altria Theatre to receive her diploma a week from today at almost the exact minute she was born on the exact day of her birth—May 26th. She will be certified as an adult twice, in two separate but simultaneous milestones, two thresholds in one leap. I sometimes wonder if it would be possible to feel more joy in this cosmic synchrony if there were less regret.

“We are shaped and fashioned by what we love,” someone once wrote. Of course, I think it is also true that we are shaped and fashioned by what loves us. It’s like the clay you throw onto the potter’s wheel with a perfect image of what you will create through your perfect attention and perfect care. But then, inevitably, distractions arise, and your vision recedes and anyway the clay has a mind of its own and starts to shape your hands as much as being shaped by them. Only when it’s a child, you are not molding matter mined from a quarry or dug from a riverbed. That’s your own DNA you’re working with. Hands that are forever attached to who you are not who you wish you were are cupping material made from your own history all while hoping to influence a future that won’t always include you.

Eighteen years. Slowly and then all at once, the potter’s wheel stops turning. The vessel leaves the studio and your shaping hands behind, ready to be broken by the world.

*

I did not expect to feel so lost. I have managed the life and living of a whole other person for 17 years and 358 days when I can barely manage my own with almost 55 years of experience.

I have been exhausted and desperate and terrified.

I have needed to be alone so badly that I’ve left the baby playing inside a plastic ring in the tub while I slumped outside the bathroom door, praying she wouldn’t drown.

I have driven a million miles a year, to school and back, to dad’s house and back, to playdates and back.

I have gotten up at 5am when the swarm of yellow jackets that stung and traumatized my eight-year-old would be least aggressive, and I have prowled through the mist with a can of gasoline, murder on my mind.

I have written letters to teachers, called therapists, summoned triple A, cooked meals, welcomed friends, bought books and laptops and earbuds and clothes and big kid Legos and plane tickets and backpacks and coats and wings for the school play and that dumb Dora wig for the ballet recital and deodorant and journals and drinks and bagels and socks and earrings and tanks of gas.

I have read Chanel Miller’s account of Brock Turner’s sexual assault and remembered a day when I was 20, having tea at a sidewalk café in London when a man verbally and lewdly assaulted me while others, handicapped by British decorum, sat silent. And I have thought: Not. On. My. Watch.

I have railed against the demands and loneliness of motherhood, I have complained and whined, I have marveled at the heights of entitlement and dismissiveness a teenager can exhibit, I have longed for days alone, nothing on the agenda. I have struggled with this role, and I have often lost sight of how to do it well, my good intentions plowed under by my own needs and addictions. At times, I have not known what to say; at other times, I have known the words but remained silent. Oh, to be given the chance to do it again. To do it better. 

*

Graduation time feels like a reckoning, a weighing of accounts. She is getting a diploma from a good high school, she seems pretty happy much of the time, she doesn’t drink or do drugs, and she’s never gotten pregnant. Are these low bars? I don’t know. Is she who she is because of me, or in spite of me? That, also, I don’t know.

Most of her life I was afraid, every day, that she would die. Sending her to college seems like opening the floodgates of danger. When she was a baby, I used to worry that the shelf for diapers and wipes over the changing table would fall and crush her little head or that she would choke on the grape I didn’t know I was supposed to cut in half. Now it’s the tractor trailer on the narrow country road, the man in the woods, the drug-soaked drink, the active shooter on campus, the icy patch of highway, the million and one poor decisions a teenager can make.

Is it possible to tease apart love and fear when the potential loss of love feels unbearable? Do I really believe she is not capable of managing her own life? Or do I simply believe I am incapable of managing my own without her in it?

“I have great news for you,” my husband, who has sent two girls off to college, says. “They always come back.”

Maybe. But they don’t come back as infants or toddlers or little girls or teens or any of those people you’ve loved so much. Those creatures are gone forever, swept down the stream like so many shards of broken pots.

I wish I knew how to be less afraid.

*

Yesterday evening, I went to Senior Night at my daughter’s school. Every senior was called on stage to stand in front of a big screen with their baby pictures on it while words of appreciation from their friends were read aloud by teachers. It was interminable. But also tender and endearing in its mix of inside jokes, laughter, tears, and oft-repeated comments like “I know you’ll do amazing things” and “I love you.”

Halfway through, my daughter was called to the stage to sing “Heart Beat Here” by Dashboard Confessional—

We found our way past our youthful fears /And fought our way through the pain and tears/ And we drove our stakes in the place most dear /And let our hearts beat here

The words felt freighted with the reality that these kids had endured, half of their high school experience highjacked by the pandemic. She and her friend who was playing guitar had practiced very little, and I was holding onto my seat barely breathing through the whole thing. But her voice swelled and carried throughout the whole auditorium and out into the hallways, this incredible wave of sound and feeling. I remembered her telling me after a day at yoga camp one summer when she was about five or six, “Ms. Nitya thinks my gift to the world is my voice.” She paused, touching the untameable curls on her head. “But I think it might be my hair.” 

My hours are shot through with such memories these days.

After the ceremony was finally over, she and I waved to each other across the auditorium, threading through people on their way to the exit. “You were amazing,” I said.

“Thank you,” she replied, hugging me, and then, eager to be with her friends, “I have a ride home.”

“Ok, be safe,” I said to the empty space in front of me.

As I walked to my car, students poured out of the school, pooling together into groups. I saw my daughter’s two best friends heading for the parking lot. Standing in the shadows, I wondered why she wasn’t with them, but then I saw her running down the steps, the three of them reunited, laughing, skittering across the pavement like leaves in the wind, no directors or cameras in sight, nothing ahead of them except the whole wide world.

~May 19, 2023~

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