Thirteen

The woman can't escape the irony and humor in dating again just as her daughter is beginning to look up and notice boys in the world. She feels under a tremendous obligation to do it right, to set a good example. She hates leaving her daughter alone at night to go out with a man, but at the same time she feels she's showing Thirteen that you can have a bad experience and move on and find joy and pleasure in life again; these things don't have to leave you bitter.

On the other hand, she doesn't want Thirteen to get to know her steady date too well, because she wants the freedom to end it if it becomes necessary. At the same time, she doesn't want her personal life to be mysterious either, leaving her daughter to worry and wonder what Mom is doing and who she's doing it with. So every time the man comes to pick her up, she asks Thirteen, "Do you want to meet him?"

For a month or so, the answer is no. The woman talks about him, casually, hoping to get Thirteen used to the idea that there is someone special, but someone not very different from her other friends. Finally, one evening, when the man comes to pick her up, and she asks Thirteen, "Do you want to meet him?" the girl shrugs. "I guess I can say hi."

The man comes in, shakes her daughter's hand, and gives her a CD he's made -- The Clash and Joe Strummer's last; he has a Thirteen, too. And that is that. How simple it is, and yet big. Her mother is not her father's wife anymore. And she's not going out with Axl Rose or Pee Wee Herman.

At her age, the woman discovers, the men who date have kids, too. She meets the man's daughter -- it's surprisingly easy, natural. His daughter is accustomed to this, meeting her father's dates. But she resists the idea of getting their kids together. She is reluctant to make mistakes. It seems a big step, too much. Her husband has a girlfriend now, and she learns he is planning for Thirteen to get together with the girlfriend's family on an upcoming ski trip. Thirteen admits she is dreading it. The woman suggests she tell her father; Thirteen doesn't have to do anything she finds uncomfortable. But she also makes a note to herself: Don't rush the family thing.

The woman and her steady have their first major conflict. She comes home dragging ass, and tells her daughter she thinks they are breaking up. Thirteen is wonderful and funny about the whole thing -- talks to her as if she is one of her friends breaking up with another eighth-grader: "It's all right, Becky. You'll get over it, you'll see," she says in her perfect Keanu Reeves/Ted of San Dimas imitation. "You're a great girl. Look how much you've got to offer." It makes her laugh, but the woman has to pull herself together, pull herself back. This is my child, not my girlfriend. It isn't up to Thirteen to console her, even as Ted of San Dimas. Such a fine line, though -- she lives with Thirteen, the girl sees her ups and downs, she can't turn herself into an Easter Island statue. When the woman is bummed, Thirteen cares, she's sensitive, she wants to make it better. And yet the woman cannot lean on her. She recites it over and over as a mantra: It's not a child's job to make a parent feel better, to make them take care of you. It's a child's God-given right NOT to care about your personal life.

Thirteen is applying to high school. Of course, the school she likes best is an hour's commute from their house. Before, during her marriage, it would have been out of the question to move, to uproot the family so that one member could go to the school of her dreams. In fact, had the woman and her husband stayed together, Thirteen probably would not have been allowed to apply to this school. The family had a center of gravity then; it wasn't a traveling show.

But now it is just her and Thirteen. They could just pick up and move.

And there it is, the frightening rub of this new life.

She lives in a particularly congenial neighborhood, interlaced with friends, colleagues, neighbors, and many of them are, like her, work-at-home writers and artists; theirs are relationships she has nurtured for fifteen years. They drop in, have coffee, see one another at Trader Joe's, meet at parties, at the clubs. Where she lives has been part of her identity; it knits her life together, like the layer of fungus that holds together the forest floor. The idea of moving an hour away fills her with unnameable panic.

But she looks at Thirteen, back in her braids and baggy T-shirts -- Spain's sartorial influence has faded somewhat -- and is reminded how time-sensitive kids are, that they're a product with a short shelf-life. She feels the weight of her responsibility to this particular item. She has exactly four more years with Thirteen, to have some kind of impact, to help make her life most closely approximate what this growing person would like for herself, to help her unfold into the young woman it is possible for her to become.

So here it is again -- the benefit and the difficulty of this kind of freedom. Whose needs get met, who takes priority? Thirteen has already been accepted into a school nearby, a good school, but perhaps not as sensational as the one across town. Anyone who has ever visited Los Angeles and attempted to drive between Silverlake and Santa Monica during morning rush hour understands that this is not something a sane person would even attempt four times a day.

Oh, she reasons with herself, she could make it work. Find someone who goes to UCLA or Santa Monica City College and pay him or her to drive. She could carpool, do the heinous thing three times a week. But having Thirteen over an hour away, staying away until seven or later each night, busy with school projects, developing a whole new set of friends whom she will never see -- the whole idea makes her fretful and sleepless. She remembers her own adolescence, and how little her parents knew. For herself, she would not want Thirteen that far away, physically or emotionally.

So whose needs? Which need? Her need to be a good parent, or her pleasure at being part of a deeply satisfying community?

She prays that Thirteen is not accepted to the school of the distant commute, or ultimately decides on something closer in. But she finds it interesting to consider the possibility of the move, the way it is interesting to torment a decaying tooth. She has the opportunity to be the mother that her mother was not, did not know enough to be.

Next Page: With her own child, she is creating a work of passion, all the more exciting and terrifying because it is improvised

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