Rending

August 1, 2012

R. and I have sailed smoothly for the past few years; what a respite, after the tumult of middle school. But for the past few weeks our terrain has been rocky: she is irritable, surly, distant; no topic is safe, no person immune. Excusing her from the dinner table so she can hibernate in her room has become standard operating procedure.

We chalk it up to her nervousness about her imminent departure for college. As fate would have it, however, I am thrashing around in my own sea of uncertainty and fear about my professional life. The mix is volatile: a teenage girl, worried about leaving home, and a post-menopausal mother, worried about her future.

This was the backdrop for our most recent clash. R. was heading out for the evening, when I spied her in the kitchen. Her perfume choked me. Then, her outfit: shorts that had about as much yardage as a table napkin, and a camisole that cinched her torso and practically put a bull’s eye on her breasts and cleavage. Her hair was curled and fell loose on her shoulders. The smile on her face was happy, self-assured and defiant.

I trailed her, speechless.

“Thanks for that,” she said.

“For what?” I replied, scrambling for some potent, parental reaction.

“I saw the look, Mom. I saw you judging me.”

She was right. I was judging her. I thought she looked sleazy. I felt embarrassed and disappointed. I felt like a failure. I felt like my mother.

When I was 16, I bought a dress for a school dance—a body-hugging black sheath with spaghetti straps—and a pair of platform sandals. In that dress, I tasted for the first time, my own allure. I felt beautiful, confident and powerful. But when I modeled it for my mother she ordered me to return it. “You’re not wearing that,” she said.

“Yes I am,” I retaliated. And so we battled.

My mother was beside herself, not just because I won, but because my victory signaled the beginning of my separation from home and from her, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.

Kids leave home. They’re supposed to. Ideally, it means that we as parents have done a good job. So, why does everything leading up to R’s departure feel like broken glass slicing my heart?

I have a friend whose son left for college a year ago. She cried constantly during the weeks before he left. He had become cold and detached. “I feel like he’s running away from home,” she said one day, through sobs.

In a way, he was.

I suppose teenagers (and I’m speaking strictly of those who leave home under optimal circumstances, either to go to school or embark on some other productive journey), especially those who are tightly knitted to family and home, have to make a break for it, or else the reality of their leaving would hurt too much: witness these last few weeks before R. moves out.

That night in the kitchen, with my judgmental scowl, I picked a fight, saying things about her appearance that I knew would sting but that momentarily distracted me from my impending sense of loss. Yet, once I spoke, R. pushed passed me and flew out the door, crying, and my heart sank to the pit of my stomach.

We are pieces of the same cloth, rending.