I am grateful my teenage daughter talks to me. She didn’t always. She was three before she thought it necessary to use words to express herself. And even then she didn’t use many. Her two older siblings filled the house with enough words, at such a high decibel, that she probably didn’t see the point. Mostly she kept her feelings to herself, other than the signature scowl she wore when forced to be in the company of strangers. Much to my mortification, some friends and family members fell into that category.
We’re sitting at the kitchen table eating dinner, Indian spiced chicken and cauliflower curry over rice, one of her favorites. She is telling me about a party she had gone to the previous Saturday, a funny story in which she was at the center of the social interaction. “You used to be so shy,” I say, struck by her description. Her transformation from bug into winged creature still seemed sudden to me.
“I wasn’t shy,” she contradicts me, “I just didn’t trust people I didn’t know. Stranger Danger,” she says, looking up from her curry in mock fear. I laugh at the picture she makes, blue eyes wide in her pale face, hanks of blond hair hanging dangerously close to her bowl.
“You didn’t trust people you HAD met before. Met several times,” I point out. She shrugs, unconcerned, rising from her chair and walking over to the stove for seconds. She’s wearing a Patagonia fleece vest that I don’t recognize, stolen from her boyfriend most likely. “You’re not so quiet anymore either,” I say, continuing my train of thought as she sits back down.
“Maybe you can just hear me now,” she replies. It’s true that when her siblings left for college her voice went from barely audible to megaphone-like projection. I think about the underlying meaning behind her words, how much my attention was diluted during her childhood, the effects her siblings had on her. While I watch her eat, I wonder how much of her personality was hard wired, how much was formed by environment, or birth order. I can still see the little girl in her at times, the quiet skeptic, cautious and deliberate. Once at age ten, she stood for an hour and a half at the top of a 20 foot high dive, determined to master her fear over the long drop into the lake. She ignored our shouts from below, to jump or come down, that she could always try another day. And she ignored both the taunts and encouragement from kids scrambling up the ladder behind her, jumping off in front of her. When she finally climbed backwards down the ladder, she was unapologetic, saying only that she wasn’t ready. But a week later she made that leap, on a quieter day, and without fanfare. Her self-determination is one of the things I admire most about her, that refusal to be rushed or coerced.
Now as a senior in high school she has gained confidence, and found her place in the complicated society of a girl tribe. Her friend group is twelve strong, and group chats have my daughter’s phone pinging constantly. But she hasn’t lost her ability to be aloof when she needs space, to ignore the clamoring. I envy her absolute contentedness in being alone. Her air of calm acceptance is Buddha-like, I think to myself, as I watch her wipe her bowl clean with a piece of naan bread and shove it into her mouth. “Thanks for dinner,” she mumbles through a mouthful of food, standing up to clear her place. “I’ve got homework,” she announces. And just like that, she is gone.
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