Debunking assumptions about adolescence

I remind myself that this is not a tragedy. Tragedy is a forty-five-year-old kid who still lives at home, expects a homemade dinner every night, and never once offers to do the dishes. This is a comedy, in which a last-minute mom gets everything she ever dreamed of, familywise, and tries to hold back the hands of time because she is afraid of her daughter's inevitable adolescence — or rather, afraid of what people say about her daughter's adolescence. On any given morning, she wonders who will walk into the kitchen for breakfast, her daughter or her daughter's evil twin, and she wonders how she will let go, whoever it is.

I once worked with a woman who talked about emotion as though it registered on a Richter scale. Her goal was to stick to the midrange, where she felt safe, and she was prepared to sacrifice ecstasy, she said, if it meant she could avoid depression as well. Not me; no coward here. For a decade I have clambered the high peaks of motherhood like Heidi with her little goat. Now I wonder if I am doomed to fall as far in the other direction, in the name of some cosmic equilibrium.

Sarah's first tooth appeared on a TWA flight from Los Angeles to New York, and as soon as we got to the hotel I compromised her eyesight to get a close-up picture of her smiling mouth. Teeth were hardly a surprise, but they did mean that the pink-gum phase of her life was over. I did not want to forget it. We were still in the archival stage of parenthood, which included monthly so-big pictures of a naked baby set on a white blanket next to Larry's outstretched hand. In the context of new parents who have made one-hour photo labs a growth industry, I figured that first-tooth photos were pretty normal.

A few months later, she crawled across the living room and out of my line of sight, of her own free will. Until that exact moment, distance had been up to me. I left for work or had lunch with a friend; if Sarah went anywhere it was because Larry or I decided she should. But this time, she was the one who decided to split, and the only proof that she was still around was a maniacal giggle from the hallway, as she considered what she had done.

Things moved fast after that. We enrolled in a mommy-and-me program when she was two and a half, and for my pains I was rendered obsolete a year later, when she started preschool. She was so used to the building where we ate Goldfish crackers and drank juice that it was no big deal if I left her there, at least not for her.

It was not the kind of preschool I went to, where a stranger in a station wagon picked me up on the first day, and three hours later my mother had to borrow a car to retrieve her bewildered, weeping daughter, who was wedged behind an art easel and refused to come out. No, Sarah's preschool took separation issues seriously. Parents were on call for two weeks, until every last toddler was able to get out of the car alone. Our kids came home with masking-tape messages stuck to their shirts, and a big one, at the start, was "Mommy always comes back." It was hard to dig in the sand and finger paint, in those early days of independence, without the promise of Mommy to lean on at the end of an arduous morning of fun.

Nobody gave me anything to ease my side of the transition. I worked, but I felt like a slavering golden retriever; I lived to bring that bundle back home.

The last spring before kindergarten, I had to go to New York, so I bought five little white T-shirts and two fabric pens, and I designed a separation wardrobe for Sarah while she slept. She was reading by now, or memorizing passages in favorite books so that it sounded like she was reading. I wasn't always sure which, but I knew absolutely that there was one sentence she could read. Shirts one through four said, "Mommy always comes back," with a red X for each day that had passed. Shirt five added a new word and proclaimed, "Mommy comes back today!" Sarah politely stacked them in her drawer and refused to wear them. Who wants a T-shirt to commemorate loss?

It took me years to figure out that those shirts were for me. "Mommy always comes back" was potentially the cruelest hoax ever perpetrated on a bunch of three-year-olds, since who knows if anyone ever comes back from anywhere, but I needed to buy it wholesale if I was going to be able to walk out the door.

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