1 week until college

A daughter's surly behavior is a symptom of something even more painful.

By Sandi Kahn Shelton

Sep 9, 1997 | my daughter, Allie, is leaving for college in one week. What this means for today -- when it's still not time to say goodbye -- is that it's impossible to make a path through her room. The floor is cluttered with bags from Filene's and J. Crew: They're filled with extra-long sheets for her dormitory bed, fleece blankets still in their wrappers, thick dark blue towels, washcloths, new pairs of jeans and sweaters, baskets of shampoo and luffas.

She won't talk about going.

I say, "I'm going to miss you," and she gives me one of her looks and finds a reason to leave the room.

Another time I say, in a voice so friendly it surprises even me: "Do you think you'll take down your posters and pictures and take them with you, or will you get new ones at college?"

She answers, in a voice filled with annoyance, "How should I know?"

I was also 18 when I left home in 1970, but instead of moving to college, I was leaving to live with my boyfriend. I had been angry with my mother for months before I left. I flung my belongings in cardboard boxes, taking everything with me because I was never, never coming back home again. My mother stood in the doorway, her arms folded, and said I was making a huge mistake. "If what you're hoping for is marriage, this isn't the way to get it," she said. "He'll just live with you and then toss you away when something better comes along. I know that type." "I'm not looking for marriage," I responded. "I'm just looking for a chance to get out of here."

My daughter is off with friends most of the time. Yesterday was the last day she'd have until Christmas with her friend Katharine, whom she'd known since kindergarten. Soon, very soon, it will be her last day with Sarah, Claire, Heather and Lauren.

And then it will be her last day with me. My friend Karen told me, "The August before I left for college, I screamed at my mother the whole month. Be prepared."

We in our 40s have mostly learned to forgive our mothers for the crimes they committed in raising us. We have paid therapists thousands of dollars and spent endless hours talking with friends, going over and over the mistakes that were our legacy, and we have figured out how not to make the same errors with our daughters. We know just what kind of support girls need.

In the cooperative day-care center my daughter attended, the young mothers sat down with story books and patiently crossed out all sexist references. We told them they could be anything they wanted to be. We said, "Don't let the boys win. You're as big and strong and capable as they are!"

So they simply can't be as angry with us as we were with our own mothers.

Yet I stand here in the kitchen, watching my daughter make a glass of iced tea. Her face, once so open and trusting, is closed to me. I struggle to think of something to say to her, something friendly and warm. I would like her to know that I admire her, that I am excited about the college she has chosen, that I know the adventure of her life is just about to get started and that I am so proud of how she's handling everything.

But here's the thing: The look on her face is so mad that I think she might slug me if I opened my mouth.

I can't think what I have done. One night not long ago -- after a particularly long period of silence between us -- I asked what I might have done or said to make her angry with me. I felt foolish saying it. My own mother, who ruled the house with such authoritative majesty, would never have deigned to find out what I thought or felt about anything she did. But there I was, obviously having offended my daughter, and I wanted to know. I felt vulnerable asking the question, but it was important.

She sighed, as though this question were more evidence of a problem so vast and fundamental that it could never be explained, and she said, "Mom, you haven't done anything. It's fine."

It is fine. It's just distant, that's all. May I tell you how close we once were? When she was two years old, my husband and I divorced -- one of those modern, amiable divorces that was just great for all parties involved, except that I had to quit my part-time job and take a full-time position. When I would come to the day-care center to pick Allie up after work, she and I would sit on the reading mattress together, and she would nurse. For a whole year after that divorce, we would sit every day at 5 o'clock, our eyes locked together, concentrating on and reconnecting with each other at the end of our public day.

In middle school, when other mothers were already lamenting the estrangement they felt with their adolescent daughters, I hit upon what seemed the perfect solution: rescue raids. I would simply show up occasionally at the school, sign her out of class and take her somewhere -- out to lunch, off to the movies, once to take a long walk on the beach. It may sound irresponsible, unsupportive of education, but it worked. It kept us close when around us other mothers and daughters were floundering. We talked about everything on those outings, outings we kept secret from the rest of the family or even from friends.

Sometimes, blow-drying her hair in the bathroom while I brushed my teeth, she'd say, "Mom, I really could use a rescue raid soon." And so I would arrange my work schedule to make one possible.

Anyone will tell you that high school is hard on the mother-daughter bond, and so it was for us, too. I'd get up with her in the early mornings to make her sandwich for school, and we'd silently drink a cup of tea together before the 6:40 school bus came. But then she decided she'd rather buy her lunch at school, and she came right out and said she'd prefer to be alone in the mornings while she got ready. It was hard to concentrate on everything she needed to do, with someone else standing there, she said.

We didn't have the typical fights that the media leads us to expect with teen-agers: She didn't go in for tattoos and body piercings; she was mostly good about curfews; she didn't drink or do drugs. Her friends seemed nice, and the boys she occasionally brought home were polite and acceptable.

But what happened? More and more often, I'd feel her eyes boring into me when I was living my regular life, doing my usual things: talking on the phone with friends, disciplining her younger sister, cleaning the bathroom. And the look on her face was a look of frozen disapproval, disappointment ... even rage.

A couple of times during her senior year I went into her room at night, when the light was off but before she went to sleep. I sat on the edge of her bed and managed to find things to say that didn't enrage or disappoint her. She told me, sometimes, about problems she was having at school: a teacher who lowered her grade because she was too shy to talk in class, a boy who teased her between classes, a friend who had started smoking. Her disembodied voice, coming out of the darkness, sounded young and questioning. She listened when I said things. A few days later, I'd hear her on the phone, repeating some of the things I had said, things she had adopted for her own, and I felt glad to have been there with her that night.

I said to myself, "Somehow I can be the right kind of mother. Somehow we will find our way back to closeness again."

We haven't found our way back. And now we are having two different kinds of Augusts. I want a romantic August, where we stock up together on things she will need in her dormitory. I want to go to lunch and lean across the tables toward each other, the way we've all seen mothers and daughters do, and say how much we will miss each other. I want smiles through tears, bittersweet moments of reminiscence of childhood and the chance to offer the last little bits of wisdom I might be able to summon for her.

But she is having an August where her feelings have gone underground, where to reach over and touch her arm seems an act of war. She pulls away, eyes hard. She turns down every invitation I extend, no matter how lightly I offer them; instead of coming out with me, she lies on her bed, reading Emily Dickinson until I say I have always loved Emily Dickinson, and then -- but is this just a coincidence? -- she closes the book.

Books I have read about surviving adolescence say that the closer your bond with your child, the more violent is the child's need to break away from you, to establish her own identity in the world. The more it will hurt, they say.

My husband says, "She's missing you so much already that she can't bear it."

A friend of mine, an editor in New York who went through a difficult adolescence with her daughter but now has become close to her again, tells me, "You're a wonderful mother. Your daughter will be back to you."

"I don't know," I say to them. I sometimes feel so angry around her that I want to go over and shake her. I want to say, "Talk to me! Either you talk to me -- or you're grounded!" I can actually feel myself wanting to say that most horrible of all mother phrases: "Think of everything I've done for you. Don't you appreciate how I've suffered and struggled to give you what you need?"

I can see how the mother-daughter relationship could turn primitive and ugly. One night I go into the den and watch "Fiddler on the Roof" with my younger daughter. She's 9, and she cuddles up next to me on the couch. We weep over the daughters saying goodbye. "It's a little like Allie leaving," she says. I hug her to me ferociously, as though I could hug all daughters trying to break away. I am not unaware that I am hugging my long-ago self, standing there so furiously, glaring at my mother, unable to forgive her.

Late at night, when I'm exhausted with the effort of trying not to mind the loneliness I've felt all day around her, I am getting ready for bed. She shows up at the door of the bathroom, watches me brush my teeth. For a moment, I think wildly that I must be brushing my teeth in a way she doesn't approve of, and I'll be upbraided for it.

But then she says, "I want to read you something." She's holding a handbook sent by her college. "These are tips for parents," she says.

I watch her face as she reads the advice aloud. "'Don't ask your student if she is homesick,' it says. 'She might feel bad the first few weeks, but don't let it worry you. This is a natural time of transition. Write her letters and call her a lot. Send a package of goodies ...'"

Her voice breaks, and she comes over to me and buries her head in my shoulder. I stroke her hair, lightly, afraid she'll bolt if I say a word. We stand there together for long moments, swaying.

I know it will be hard again. We probably won't have sentimental lunches in restaurants before she leaves, and most likely there will be a fight about something. But I am grateful to be standing in the bathroom at midnight, both of us tired and sad, toothpaste smeared on my chin, holding tight -- while at the same time letting go -- of this daughter who is trying to say goodbye.

• View blog reactions