Thirteen

She thinks back on all the times she has been bewildered upon learning that one of her neighbors was moving to some suburb of the "better school." It had always upset her to hear of one more woman scuttling her own satisfaction to provide for someone else's. First, as a daughter, to be a good girl, to please the parent; then, as a mother, shortchanging herself for the children's sake. And when is it going to be your turn? she always wanted to ask.

Now she thinks of her own mother, a woman who has in later life emerged as the grandmother from heaven, but who, back in the day, considered a child's place secondary to the needs of the adults in the family. The urgency of livelihood. It never occurred to parents of that day to ask, "What is it you need from me?" "How can I help you?" Pressed for time and energy, they kept their heads down in the battle zone and soldiered on. If someone had suggested that a mother could do more to support her daughter's unfolding self, that mother would have stared in blank incomprehension.

The woman once wrote a book about a mother and a daughter, and in the process considered long and hard the question What is it that makes a good mother? As far as she could ascertain, it seemed to boil down to a fairly simple set of issues. A lousy mother was someone who looked at her kid and said, "Here's who I want you to be" and "Here's what I'm going to give you." A good mother was the one who looked at her kid, really looked at her, and asked, "Who are you?" and "What do you need from me?"

How many children are ever really seen? How many, on the other hand, are given what their parents want to give them -- things they need like an Inuit needs an icebox? Things that leave a child frustrated and furious, like getting the Christmas present that's just what the giver wanted. Violin lessons when a child is an artist. Restriction when she needs encouragement. Stoicism when she needs a soft shoulder. And how many future neuroses can be traced back to those misfires?

So why is it so bloody hard for mothers to turn to their own children and look them in the eye and say, "What do you need from me?"

Now the woman knows why: Because then you know, and have to respond. It might not be convenient. It might not be what you wanted to give.

She remembered something that happened when Thirteen was younger. She'd saved a box of books from her own childhood -- the best-loved, treasured, and carefully preserved -- for the time she would have her own daughter. She had just got to the best of them all -- King of the Wind by Marguerite Henry -- a book in which she had lived for several crucial years of her unhappy but imaginative childhood. She worshiped that book, she became that book.

But when she finally opened that cherished volume and began to read it aloud to her child, her daughter groaned and said, "Oh God, not another sad horse story."

What fury, what frustration -- at having saved those books for some idealized child who would appreciate just how wonderful they were, and then, instead, having this real little kid who didn't like sad horse stories. That ungrateful brat, trampling the mother's cherished fantasies of sharing these books with an appreciative daughter, connecting the then with the now.

Fortunately, just as her temper began to erupt, she had one of those blessed moments -- perhaps there are angels or ancestors who do come to our aid -- when you step outside yourself and see the reality of that little person. She had a daughter who did not care for sad horse stories. She didn't need what her mother wanted to give her. She needed something else.

Thank God for King of the Wind. It had been worth saving after all.

What does Thirteen really need from her? Not a good book, not even a soft shoulder to cry on, not kiddie art classes or even the benefit of her often shaky wisdom. She needs her to ante up. She needs a mother willing to cross a city for her, a mother watching, listening. Willing to know.

There are only four more years that she will have Thirteen. The girl won't need her hair brushed, won't want to play stuffed animals. She won't even necessarily be aware of what it is she needs. But the clock is running. The woman knows, has known since Spain, that there is not much time left. There will be time to live exactly the way she would like, many years for that.

But as an artist, she knows as she has always known, that the pleasure of creation takes precedence over any of the more passive pleasures. With her own child, she is creating a work of passion, all the more exciting and terrifying because it is utterly improvised. That day, at the table in Lesn, she had seen what she wanted: relationships that continued and replenished themselves, like the couples walking in the evening arm-in-arm. And when the separation that had begun with Thirteen in Spain is complete, this is perhaps the best that she can hope for -- that the mistakes and the negotiations and the trials and the errors of these freelance years have resulted in a mutual respect that will only deepen with time. And that they will always be able to muster a conversation over their coffee cups in a small foreign town.

Excerpted from "Because I Said So: 33 Mothers Write About Children, Sex, Men, Aging, Faith, Race & Themselves," edited by Kate Moses and Camille Peri, former editors of Salon's Mothers Who Think. Copyright (c) 2005 by HarperCollins. Published by arrangement with HarperCollins Publishers.