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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 My daughter is eighteen—halfway to nineteen—as I write these last pages. Time flies on paper. Of course, times flies anywhere. It hardly seems possible that I began making notes toward this essay when she was only eleven years old, when it was still difficult for her to be away overnight. Now she is at college six hundred miles from home. She rarely calls when she’s away at school. She’s too busy, she tells me—not untruthfully, but incompletely. It’s too taxing, she allowed herself, just once, to admit. She and I have no small talk, and we haven’t figured out yet (it’s possible we never will) how to “just check in,” the way people do: hello, all’s well, here’s the latest news from school/from home, goodbye. If we talk, we talk. And so we go for weeks, for months, not talking at all. When she comes home for a visit, though, we talk the way we always have. It does my heart good to be reminded, listening to her talk about her life, that if she needs to try to figure something out, she knows how to do it. When I think about my accomplishments as her mother—and I do think about them, especially when she is back at school and I am missing her; it helps to buoy me up when I am feeling low—I count this among them: that at eighteen and a half, she may be as much of an expert in herself as it is possible to be. I count accomplishments, and I count blessings, too. That she sees things, always now, at the size they really are and at the distance from her that they really are. That like the other symptoms/metaphors that plagued her longer ago than Getting-Smaller-and-Getting-Bigger (the trash saving and the “catching up,” the need to make things come out even, the compulsive stream-of-consciousness monologizing), this one lost its usefulness as a way to express a truth about herself to herself—or even just to remind her that a battle might not be quite over, to whisper don’t forget. And while I sometimes pine for the sound of her voice when Seeing Things 145 she’s away at school, busy with her theater and psychology classes, her work-study job at a children’s theater, her rehearsals, her friends, and everything else—I also celebrate, daily, in private, the triumph that her not-calling represents. That she doesn’t need to tell me everything she’s doing, everything that’s on her mind. That she’s living her life. Idios. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean that my daughter is not capable of kidding herself. I don’t mean that she—that anyone—can have it all figured out, can be immune to the guiding hand of her own unconscious . I don’t even mean that I’d want her to be, if I had a say in it. So much of the joy—and so much of the art—of a life fully lived comes to us through what isn’t conscious choice or action, through what seems to choose us. When someone says he never felt he’d made a choice—about whom to love, or about his occupation (“I didn’t choose to be a writer, it was simply what I was,” or, more solemnly, “It chose me”)—he’s talking about the unconscious forces that shape us. For better or for worse. I thought about this after a telephone conversation with an old friend, a conversation that made me shake my head (in pity, in wonder ). The friend is someone of whom I am deeply fond, although we haven’t seen each other in many years—although, in fact, we rarely talk anymore, even on the phone. Because she is a decade younger than I and was still in college when we met, I continue to think of her as “young,” despite the fact that she is middle aged herself now. Just as I continue to think of her as a close friend, even though we hardly ever talk, even though she lives eight hundred miles away. But we used to live in the same town. For two years when I first knew her, and then for two years somewhere else, we lived in the same town and saw each other nearly every...
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