Thirteen

My husband and I separated the year my daughter turned 13. She was deliciously wise and fun, but I knew I couldn't slip into "us girls." She needed a mother.

by Janet Fitch

May 5, 2005 | The Americans sit at a table in Lesn, Spain, when the evening at last takes the bite off the heat, watching the couples, arm in arm, strolling in a steady procession past the cafis and cathedral. The wife envies how they walk in step, speak quietly to one another, couples who may have known each other for twenty, forty, sixty years. She marvels at how they still walk close to one another, muster a conversation, when she and her husband have nothing left to say across the gap of a very small table.

Their daughter sprawls in the third chair. Thirteen years old, and for years she has watched the rocky ride of their problematic marriage. The older she gets, the more obvious it becomes that her mother and her father have nothing left between them. And they have grown less able to conceal it. Or perhaps feel less need to do so -- their girl is older, understands more. Perhaps they are tired of pretending.

It is almost four weeks that they have traveled together, without a break, and they are separating further with each passing day, while the daughter, on the brink of adolescence, is separating from them both. The wife watches her child's new detachment with mingled regret and fascination. Just a few weeks ago this was a slouchy, baggy pantsand-T-shirted American girl. Suddenly her grungy offspring is watching herself in the shop windows of Seville and Cordoba and Madrid, Barcelona and San Sebastian and Segovia. And men, for the first time, are noticing her. Thirteen, but with a graceful body, her rippling dark hair twisted and clipped up, rather than tightly braided, as it is at home. Thirteen, but in Spain, she is wearing her clothes differently; she stands erect, walks with a new self-possession. This physical change is mirrored in the cafi by how she divorces herself from her parents as they sit, fuming in their isolation, their rage and despair. They are a couple of old people with their own problems.

On their return to America, the husband and the wife separate. The girl is not surprised. After what she has seen, she would have been surprised had they stayed together. The husband moves to a beachside town. The wife exhales. The yelling is over, the criticism, the second-guessing of every decision. She and the daughter sit across from each other at the dinner table. They are free now -- to make decisions, to make mistakes, to collude, to negotiate, with respect. Free to grow into something neither of them can yet imagine.

She had been ready for her husband to leave for years. What she had not considered was how it would feel seeing her daughter pack her suitcase, her toothbrush, her teddy, and leave with him for the first time. She did not do one thing until her daughter returned on Sunday night. There were things to accomplish, a book to write, friends she could have called, relatives, errands, and chores, and yet, she did none of them. The shock -- that she would lose not only her husband but also her daughter, at least part of the time -- was something that had never entered her consciousness.

The separation, which had begun in Spain and which was naturally a part of her daughter's movement into adolescence, would not stop now.

She thinks, half the world has gone through this, but now it was her turn to discover what it meant to be a single mother, to construct a new life with her thirteen-year-old daughter. Thirteen. That is an important fact. Keep it in mind.

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It occurs to her that she doesn't know how to do this -- head a household, make a family when it is just the two of them. The husband provided most of the structure in their family life. Vacations, mealtimes, chores, homework. Now that it's just the two of them, how very fluid their world becomes. They don't know when to eat, what to eat, how casual it should be, when Thirteen should go to bed, do her homework. How clean to keep the house, how often a child of thirteen should be left alone in the evening.

She feels how lovely it is, absolutely liberating, this freedom to construct a life tailor-made for them alone. It will give them a chance to be absolutely themselves.

On the other hand, she has to admit that, as the weeks go on, the responsibility is a creeping anxiety. What does it mean if she goes out again, the third time this week? What does it mean to reheat last night's dinner, or to microwave something from Trader Joe's? How far can a family break down and still be a family? Is two a family?

Next Page: She began to see her daughter as having come of age and capacity, more entitled to make decisions for herself, no longer a child

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