by Abbi Waxman
No, of course I’m joking. It was occasional sparkling moments of triumph dotted over long stretches of uncertainty and failure. There were days when I felt I’d managed, and days where I knew if I hadn’t had the help of several other women, both at home and at work, I would have dug my own grave and climbed in.
Just when I thought I was finally getting a little better at the balancing act, when Emily was happy at school and work was going well, and I was senior enough to be able to leave at a reasonable hour to eat dinner with my kid, and have weekends free to spend with her, everything changed. She woke up a teenager, and all the skills I’d learned were useless, and all the time I’d fought to have with her was spent waiting for her to come home from hanging out with friends she’d much rather talk to than me.
If I said it was awesome, you’d know I was being sarcastic, right?
That’s what I thought.
I went to the grocery store to pick up dinner, and to ponder whether or not to tell Emily I’d just potentially torpedoed her tuition money.
* * *
• • •
When I came back, there was a different quality to the silence.
“Em?”
Still nothing, but I noticed her sneakers by the door. She was home, presumably lurking in her dank, bone-strewn lair upstairs. Hopefully packing for the trip.
If my life were a Choose Your Own Adventure book, I’d have two options at this point. One, walk into the kitchen and not check on Emily. Have a cup of coffee and unload the dishwasher. Stare into the middle distance and adjust my underwire. Or two, go upstairs and speak directly to my daughter, because she’s probably got headphones in and can’t hear me calling. That would lead to another fork in the road: She could nod pleasantly, we might exchange a smile, maybe even a hug, and she’d reassure me her packing was all done. Or—and this had a high probability—she’d frown at me as I appeared in her doorway, tug out a single earbud, raise her eyebrows at me, and say, What? in a tone of voice that implied I was interrupting her solving the problem of clean, limitless energy. I’d feel a tiny pang of pain, tempered with irritation at being talked to like that, and ask her about the packing. She’d shrug and say, Of course, as if being unprepared is something alien to her, and implying my lack of trust is hobbling her ability to grow as an individual. Then, two days into the trip, we’d discover she’d forgotten to pack even a single pair of socks and the rest of the week would be spent with I told you so hanging over us like an unacknowledged fart.
My mother didn’t raise no fool. I walked into the kitchen and turned on the kettle.
EMILY
I checked my list again: seven days of underwear, extra shoes, soap, socks, and sanitary protection . . . check, check, check. Dude, I am so on it.
I paused. Was that Mom? Silence, then distant noises from the kitchen. Guess she didn’t even want to say hello to me. Charming.
I checked my list a second time and threw in another pair of socks. My mom might not have been interested in my life, but she definitely taught me how to pack.
Sunday
Los Angeles to Washington
Fly to Washington, DC
Check into hotel
3
JESSICA
Emily, who up until that moment had been silently gazing at her phone as if frozen to a stump, suddenly said, “Mother, the Lyft is here and he’s only going to wait three minutes.” She shifted her feet in my old Converse high-tops. I love that she wears them, not that I could ever tell her that. I have to pretend to be vaguely irritated, to make the theft more fun.
“Why?” I was hunting through my purse for something, but I’ve now completely forgotten what. I’m telling you, I’ve got a brain tumor the size of a clementine.
“Because that’s what it says on the app.” The ancient Greeks had the oracle of Delphi; we have an app for that.
I gave up my hunt for whatever it was. “Well, go start putting your bags in the trunk, then, and see what the actual driver says. He’s probably more flexible than an app.”
Emily huffed her way to the door and slammed it. Door slamming—if I may digress for a moment—is a matter of art for my daughter. If Emily wants to express herself, she’s adept at threading the needle between firm closing and actual slamming. Then, when I yell, “Stop slamming the goddamned door,” she achieves plausible deniability with an injured tone. Of course, if she’s leaving the house, she has more options. Emily would probably say she shut the door firmly. I felt a slam. Maybe the slam is in the ear of the beholder. Or be-hearer?
Anna, our live-in nanny, was standing there, patiently waiting for this part to be over so she could go back to bed. I’d told her she didn’t need to get up, but she thinks I’m incompetent (probably based on extensive observation). We don’t really need a full-time nanny anymore, but I frequently have to work late, or on the weekends, and get little to no warning. Part of me knows Emily, at sixteen, is totally capable of taking care of herself, but a bigger part of me thinks it’s a good idea not to leave her alone too much. If you think about it, it’s like having an old-fashioned wife waiting for me at home, fall-backing my career so I can excel in that arena, and plastering over any cracks my kid might fall into. I’m not 100 percent confident it’s working all that well, but Anna has been part of our family for a long time, and you can’t fire family.
“Good luck,” Anna said. I’m sure she did wish me luck, but I had a sneaking suspicion she also enjoyed the prospect of me spending seven days alone with my teenage daughter. Anna is from El Salvador, raised her own three kids, and then moved to the States to help Americans raise theirs. She’s an intelligent woman, and I’m confident she appreciates the irony of my situation: I work incredibly hard to make enough money to pay her to do the work that would prevent me from working hard enough to make the money I need to pay her to do the work . . . and so the circle of capitalism goes. Hakuna that matata, ladies.
Anyway, Anna and I get along pretty well, although we’re basically shift workers sharing the same job. Both of us know the job’s coming to an end, because this trip is about looking at colleges, and then, in another year, Emily will leave home and we’ll both be unemployed. The difference being Anna was going to retire to El Salvador and play with her grandkids, living in a house her kids had built for her in the village they’d all grown up in, and I was going to be alone, rattling around in my pod like the world’s biggest loser pea. I’d go to work, forget everything except what was in front of me, and then come home and call Emily’s name before remembering she wasn’t there anymore.
“Mother!!” Emily was shouting from outside. Two full syllables, both exasperated. I won’t miss that part.
I wheeled my bag to the street. “Aren’t you going to say goodbye to Anna?” I swear to you my tone was neutral, but Emily frowned. You’d need a micrometer to measure her hair trigger these days. Maybe that was what I was hunting for in my bag.
“Of course!” she snapped. She ran to Anna, giving her the kind of full-on, 100 percent hug she hasn’t given me in about three years. Anna looked at me over my daughter’s head, and her eyes held apology tempered with a very light sprinkling of pride. We both know Emily loves me, we both know it’s age-appropriate for her to separate hard from her mother, but I suspect Anna enjoys those moments when Emily is nicer to her than she is to me.
I hadn’t told Emily about quitting yet. I didn’t want to freak her out, and I was kind of hoping my power move would work and John would sort things out before I got back. Besides, this trip is about reconnection and bonding. Em and I are going to be alone together, we’re going to talk, we’re going to laugh and cry, we’re going to salvage the shreds of our relationship and weave them into a beautiful blanket that will keep us warm for the rest of our lives. Something like that, anyway. Some thought that can be typeset against a sunrise and shared online.
No pressure.
EMILY
> This trip is going to be a total yawn, but I am so glad to dip I wouldn’t care if we were silently touring monasteries in rural Wisconsin. (No, I’m not sure why that popped into my head. I think I saw something online about millennial nuns, don’t judge me.) When Mom originally suggested this organized college tour, I kind of raised my eyebrows, especially once I realized it was a load of kids and parents, and therefore enforced socialization, which I hate. But nothing said I had to talk to anyone, right? Besides, at the rate Mom is going, we’re going to miss the plane anyway.
My mother is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. She’s a lawyer and can see a hole in an argument from a mile away, which makes life a little challenging. However, for some reason, it takes her approximately forever to get out of the house if she’s not going to work. On a workday she clacks around in the kitchen, her wireless earbuds and vacant expression the only clues to the conference call she’s attending, grabbing coffee and unsalted almonds and taking whatever weird supplement she’s trying out that week. She always wears her hair in one of those low knot things at the back of her head, like a ballerina, but I think she’s prettier when she wears it down. If I walk in she points at her ears so I won’t speak to her, and then—if I’m lucky—she’ll throw me a smile before leaving, clicking the car keys in her pocket. On a non-workday, like today, she only has to put her phone in her purse and walk out, but she’s always forgetting something, or going back to turn something off, whatever. Let it burn, I say.
Generally, she’s been a lot spacier lately. I’m not going to drop the M word, but in Health we learned it gives you brain fog to go with your dry vagina and night sweats. I’ll be brutal; they didn’t really sell it, though it was still better than that childbirth video. It’s amazing there’s anything left of your vagina to dry out.
My phone pinged and I told Mom the Lyft guy was waiting. She snapped at me to stall the driver, no pressure, that’s fine. Then when she finally dragged her butt outside, she sarcastically reminded me to hug Anna as if I’d forgotten. Which I had, not the point. Anna is awesome; she takes care of me and leaves me alone, which is the very definition of good parenting, in my opinion. She doesn’t expect all that much from me, unlike my mother. I’m doing my best here, but for Mom that’s never going to be enough.
The Lyft driver was on top of his game. No four-star ratings to lower his average, no sir. He had water bottles. He had hand sanitizer. He had cool jazz playing, and the car smelled of coconut and mango. A mini-vacation on the way to vacation.
I asked my mom if we were sitting together on the plane, but she didn’t know. I’m not scared of flying, but I don’t love it, and Mom said the flight was over five hours long and longer on the way back. Kill me now.
I love my mom, don’t misunderstand me, she’s just a bit up in my beak. She thinks about me too much, it’s creepy. My friends think she’s cool, but that’s because she’s not going to remind them to clean their room or ask about their homework. She waits till they’re gone and then leans in my doorway, like she’s, you know, dropping by, and asks forty thousand questions. If she cares so much about my homework, she should do it herself.
JESSICA
“Mom?”
I smiled at Emily. “Yes?”
“Are we sitting together on the plane?”
“Actually, no. I have to fix it at the airport.” When I’d checked us in the night before, I’d seen the mistake but hadn’t been able to fix it online. Emily shook her head.
“It’s fine.” She paused. “We don’t have to, I just wondered.” In her lap her hands made a half gesture that disowned interest in the outcome.
“Okay,” I said, letting it go, which is my latest parenting strategy. Apparently, I have a tendency to overanalyze everything and then dare to ask follow-up questions, and she gets pissy and I get pissy and we’re off. We’re only ever three sentences away from a fight.
My sister, Lizzy, had gently pointed out this habit, and after wasting forty minutes defending myself, I accepted that anxiety about Emily was making me treat her like an unfriendly witness. But not on this trip, baby. On this trip I was going to take some sage advice and talk to my daughter as if she were a visiting cousin from another state.
“How long is the flight?” asked Emily.
“Around five hours, give or take.”
“That’s nuts, it’s quicker than driving to San Francisco.”
I bit down on the explanation of time as a relationship between speed and distance. This was something else Lizzy told me not to do.
“You’re mom-splaining,” she’d said carefully. “It makes Emily feel like a child and she doesn’t want to feel that way. It’s better intentioned than mansplaining, but equally as irritating.” Lizzy is a completely disorganized part-time teacher and mom of three whose husband is barely contributing enough money as an actor to keep them in ramen noodles, and who is inexplicably happier than I am. Her kids are all at Peak Kid age, so she doesn’t know about teenagers yet.
So I said nothing. Both then, to Lizzy, and now, to Emily.
EMILY
In eighth grade I did a project on Los Angeles International Airport for Social Studies. I had to read about the history of air travel, traffic patterns, architects; it was like 10 percent of the grade. I was a total suck-up. I worked on that thing for weeks. I made one of those tri-fold boards and a freaking diorama with little bushes my mom found somewhere, and tiny cars and planes. I really got into model making and origami and that kind of thing, and I got an A, not to flex or anything. However, the only fact I remember is that LAX gets over eighty-four million passengers a year, and as we came up on the terminal, it looked like every one of them had decided to travel today. The driver squeaked past two buses and defied the laws of physics to fit into a space much smaller than the car. Five-star review for you, sir.
I followed my mom into the terminal. She knew where she was going, because she always does. She’s very certain, my mom. I snapped a pic of the terminal while we were checking the bags, then captioned it Gateway to hell and posted it. The terminal smelled of coffee and printer ink, like always. I got that feeling I get in airports: DEFCON 3, slightly on edge, ready for delay or confusion. Then I noticed a cute guy walking towards the security line, and I start moving in that direction, one of my rolly wheels clicking loudly. Awkward.
JESSICA
Emily was ahead of me at the scanners, and I watched as she easily removed her shoes, dropped her laptop and phone in one tray and her jacket in another, and turned to go through the metal detectors. This is what air travel is to her; this is what it’s always been.
I remember September 11 clearly; we all do. I’d been filled with joy, walking my dog in Riverside Park and enjoying what was, even for New York in early fall, an exceptionally beautiful morning. I was a young lawyer, working hard but having a lot of fun, and my life rolled ahead of me like the yellow-brick road. Of course, that had been 8:00 a.m., and by 9:15, things would never be the same again, but for Emily, who at that point was an unsuspected and rapidly dividing clump of cells in my body, this level of airport scrutiny and anxiety was normal. If they’d waved her through with a smile and let her run up to the gate, she’d refuse to get on the plane.
Somehow an entire family had gotten ahead of me at the line for trays, so I was able to watch Emily go through the metal detector and wait for her stuff. A cute guy smiled at her, but I don’t think she even noticed. She’s very pretty, but in a way that apparently isn’t fashionable right now: She has her own eyebrows, her own hair color, her own cheekbones and freckles, and in general she’s more Hepburn than Kardashian. It’s all very well that I know Audrey’s a better choice than Kim (no offense, Kim). Emily needs to know it, and it doesn’t seem like she does.
When I got to the gate, I headed to the desk to try to change our seats. I’d thought Emily was right behind me, but when I looked around, she was nowhere to be seen. I r
emembered she’d muttered something about Starbucks. The check-in agent didn’t look thrilled to see me, but then again, I was probably either the first of many or the last of many, and I would pace myself, too.
“Yes, hi,” I said, with what I hoped was the right blend of friendliness and efficiency. “I was wondering if it was possible to change seats? My daughter and I aren’t sitting together, not really sure why, my assistant made the reservation”—assistants, seriously, what can you do?—“and we’d really like to be together on the flight . . .” I trailed off and showed the agent the little square code thing on my phone screen.
The agent, who looked like she didn’t care if a walrus made the reservation, scanned the phone and gazed at her invisible screen.
“Oh, I’m sorry, we’re fully booked. Your best bet is to wait until you’re on the flight and ask the attendant if he or she can help you swap with someone.”
“Has everyone checked in?”
“No, not yet.”
“So there may be empty seats anyway?”
The woman looked at me and then at something to my left.
“We’re not together?” It was Emily, who had arrived holding an enormous cup colored pink and blue in stripes. Honestly, does she know nothing about glycemic load or bladder capacity? I’d be willing to bet she’d spend longer photographing that than she would drinking it.
“No,” I said, hoping she’d back me up and guilt the gate agent into pulling strings.