In Silences, She Hears a Daughter Moving On

We are alone in the car, my oldest daughter and I. It is a long trip and our radio is on the blink, able to deliver only static.

Suddenly, I am painfully aware of the silence between us. It has been 20 miles and my teenage daughter has said nothing to me.

She is not angry, just silent. Lost in thought, maybe . . . or tired or bored. Or just disconnected and far away.

I try to break through, to pierce the silence with conversation I imagine will engage and draw her back to me: I chatter on about her friends, our summer plans, the movies we both want to see.

She tolerates my intrusions, answering my questions patiently. Then she turns away and tunes me out, staring silently out the window.

I feel my heart seize up at the notion that this child--who has so often through the years seemed to be at one with me--is slipping off into a world of her own creation . . . a world that will no longer include me.

And I wish I could enjoy the moment--no radio blasting, no screaming children in the back seat. Just two silent traveling companions, caught up in their individual reveries. I wish I didn’t find it so threatening, a harbinger of the separation that’s bound to come.

*

There is a sort of magnetic force that governs these early years of adolescence, it seems.

I see in my child a combination of independence and vulnerability that draws me in, then rejects me, forcing me to the sidelines to watch as my 14-year-old edges closer to the woman that she will one day be.

She grows more like me every day: I look for my shoes and cannot find them; they are on her feet. My friends call the house and chat with her, believing, from the sound of her voice, that she is me. She proclaims a new musical favorite, and I discover it’s from my Prince CD . . . my own personal favorite when I was not much older than she.

Our orbits are finally overlapping, it seems; she is inching closer to me, tantalizing me with a vision of a child who is growing into a friend.

But then, just as I’m congratulating myself on my good fortune, I slam into her wall of silence and we seem further apart than I ever imagined we’d be.

I have read the books and talked with the experts--friends who have already raised their teens or who seem to be coping more competently.

I understand that this is normal, even necessary . . . that teenagers need to assert themselves, to pull away from their parents and move into a world outside of family.

And I was never arrogant enough to believe my daughter would stay bound to me. Still, I feel betrayed by time as the silences grow longer, as she shuts me out more frequently. Because, if I am not yet the enemy, I have become already, in her eyes, irrelevant, uninteresting.

*

I can’t help but think back to when she was small and would jabber on about her day until the sound of her squeaky voice made my temples pound and reverberated inside my brain.

There was so much she had to say, and I had so little patience for her stories some days. So we began a bedtime ritual that would keep the stories flowing and keep us linked from day to day.

Each night, while Daddy tended her little sisters, I’d lie down in the dark beside her and we’d recount our “best and worst” of the day.

I’d tell her, then she’d tell me, of small triumphs and tragedies. . . . I’d had fun at lunch with a friend at work but got a speeding ticket on my way home on the freeway. She got hit by the tetherball at recess but was picked by her teacher to be Student of the Week.

But “best and worst” stopped the year her father died, when she was 8. Somehow, for me at least, “worst” seemed like a no-brainer, and “best” seemed hard to come by in those first bleak days.

And over the years, despite my best intentions, life seemed too hectic to accommodate those quiet bedtime moments. It was all I could do every evening to get three kids bathed, teeth brushed, prayers said before we called it a day.

And I wonder now, as I ponder her silence, is it too late to begin anew? Or might my worst--”You didn’t say a word to me during our ride”--wind up as her best: “Mom didn’t bug me in the car today.”