Going, Going...

Preparing for departure

My almost seventeen-year-old daughter and I are sitting at our kitchen island, late afternoon sun casting a long shard of light on the tabletop, like a stretched mountain peak. It feels amazing, sitting quietly with her. I could stay here forever.

“Can you stop?” she asks me.

“Stop what?” I say.

“Making that face,” she says.

“What kind of face am I making?”

“A weird one.”

I try for a normal expression.

“That’s the weird face,” she says.

It’s probably the face I’ve seen when I accidentally hit the selfie/camera flip button, and I think, Good god, what is that?!

Either way, she’s going to have to live with it, at least until she’s out of the house in just over a year’s time. Which, of course, makes me unbelievably sad to think about. Maybe that’s what’s causing this weird face.

Nobody told me how fast this would go. Actually, that’s not true. Everybody told me how fast this would go. Every single parent I ever met with kids older than mine. They all told me this, again and again, for years. I didn’t listen. Nobody does. You can’t possibly know what it’s like until you see them nearing the end of the runway, take-off imminent. Don’t go, I think. It’s not enough time.

She and I visit colleges together. We visit a small liberal arts women’s college and I can see her here. It’s beautiful. And only a three-hour drive.

Three hours away. My baby.

We stroll through campus. “I love it,” she says softly. “Imagine, being in a classroom without dudes.” She’s beaming at the thought.

“Yes,” I say. “That would be amazing.” She could thrive here, in this dude-free learning paradise. The students here look artsy and happy. She has to get out of our small town, I know, but I’m equal parts thrilled and devastated by this whole enterprise.

How does anyone ever feel ready for something like this?

It doesn’t matter; teens help us get ready. She’s sweet with us much of the time, but every so often a fog of extreme annoyance will roll across the landscape. She’ll turn suddenly to me or Emma, and say, “Can you just go somewhere else?”

“Before I had my license,” I tell her when she’s in one of these moods, “I made Nana drop me off two blocks away from the school dance. She asked why and I said, ‘Because! Somebody might see you!’”

I see a tiny half-smile before she says, “Whatever, this is different.”

“It is,” I agree.

“Stop agreeing with me,” she says. “It’s really annoying.”

“I can see that,” I say.

“You’re therapizing me,” she says.

I smile and stay quiet. It’s the only way I don’t annoy her when she’s pushing away.

“You’re being boring,” she says. “I’m going upstairs.”

I adore this human, more than I can say, no matter what she thinks of the faces I make, my weirdness, the things I do, or don’t do. I feel her pushing away in this totally expected, 100% on-track way, and it reminds me, again and again, she’s leaving, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

“I feel like when we annoy them,” Emma says, “we’ve done something right.”

We were staying in a hotel over the holidays, and Chappell Roan came on in the elevator, just the four of us riding down to the lobby.

“No!” our daughter said, turning sharply toward Emma. “No!” our thirteen-year-old son joined in, but it was too late. Emma was already doing a little shimmy with her shoulders. She got the hips going, hands above her head like she was on a dance floor. Both the kids started freaking out. “Stop dancing!” they shouted. “You’re embarrassing yourself!”

“She doesn’t seem embarrassed,” I said.

With a ping, the doors opened to the ground floor, where the same song was playing throughout the restaurant lounge. The kids piled out, attempting a desperate escape as Emma danced behind them, past the low tables and banquettes, around monsteras and fig trees, all the way out into the lobby, right on their tails.

Our daughter will escape us, and not so long after that, our son, but not yet. They’re stuck with us for now. All we can do is dance and embarrass them, showering them with love and mortification, even—or especially—when they push us away.

I think happily on this as I trail all of them, heading out the lobby door toward tacos, out onto the moonlit sidewalk, definitely making some kind of weird face.