Too Much for One Suitcase

I remember the day my daughter Lucia was born. I felt an enormous wave of surprise and then joy. I was sure Lucia was going to be a boy because my mail carrier Denise always said that I was carrying a boy. She was so sure that it made me sure. “When you can’t tell you’re pregnant from behind, it’s a boy,” she said, “because girls steal your beauty.”

I remember being kind of appalled by that statement, but I was fond of Denise and decided to simply accept her prophecy and disregard the rest. I was in labor for forty-three hours. This was in the days of flip phones and fewer cell towers so we were not in touch with the outside world every second. While I labored in the hospital, no one on the outside knew what was going on.

Finally, in a fit of energy that came literally from the depths of my loins, I stood up, leaned on the extra bed in my room, and squatted Lucia out. “It’s a girl,” the midwife declared, and as I stood, legs trembling, they bundled her up and gave her to my partner to hold while I hung out a while longer to deliver the placenta.

When I finally held Lucia I felt like I knew her, like somehow she’d always been there. I was elated, comforted, that this little being would be familiar to me — I had been a baby girl once and worked my way through the stages of girlhood into womanhood. I would be able to understand and comfort this precious being. I would be a good mom to her.

Now Lucia is seventeen, at the edge of womanhood, the precipice of independence. I still remember as clear as yesterday the moment I first held her, first understood that she would be my daughter. It’s been hard lately. I’m the heavy, the rule-maker, the line-drawer, the boundary-setter. In the eyes of a young woman who feels ready to launch, I am a major spoiler.

Last week in a hangover of mother-daughter conflict, I was walking along the lake and I had the image of a suitcase, an old brown canvas suitcase with Naugahyde trim and silver buckles, stuffed with wrinkled clothes and too many shoes. The suitcase was too full to zip up and clothes were squirting out from all sides. This suitcase is Lucia’s life right now. She is bursting at the seams and I am trying to tuck her in, squeeze all her parts into the suitcase so I can zip it up and keep her contained. It’s not working. 

I’ve been thinking about that suitcase, about how it would feel to Lucia to be stuffed into a place she no longer fits. I’ve been there. I faintly remember the days when I didn’t understand why my parents had rules; I remember thinking the demands they made were arbitrary and controlling. The curfew, room cleaning, and nightly dinners made me mad and resentful.

A few days ago I caught Lucia in a big lie. She tried to cover it up but ultimately exposed herself and got busted. The suitcase was exploding before my eyes. While I waited for Lucia to come home from a friend’s house I panicked about how I would respond to her. My partner talked me through it —  she reminded me that Lucia needs guidelines and consequences, she coached me to stay calm, and reinforced the reality of the situation — that Lucia is still Lucia, she’s just being seventeen.

When Lucia got home we went upstairs to talk. “Do you want to say anything?”, I calmly asked her. Sitting on my bed, legs hanging over the edge, she looked at me and told me the truth about where she had slept the night before. 

We talked for a long time — about what a better option would have been to retain trust in our relationship, about what’s going on with her at school, about how she feels tired and overwhelmed in her life right now. I’ve imagined how insane it must be to be Lucia — school every day, a job both weekend days, homework, friends, college prep. It’s a hamster wheel of responsibility in a body that’s still figuring out what it means to be in charge.

The feeling I got from Lucia, even though she’d just been busted, was one of relief. “I just feel so tired Mom, like life never stops,” she moaned while lying on her side, perched on her right elbow. “That’s a message,” I told her, “and you have to listen to that. You have to set some limits for yourself so you don’t feel so crazy.” 

I understood at that moment that right now, as much as she wants to, Lucia can’t hear her own signals. There is too much noise and distraction and expectation. She’ll keep going, maybe until she’s in trouble. So for now I need to help her know her limits.

The conversation went far better than I had hoped. I felt, for the first time in weeks, that we’d truly heard one another. Shortly after we talked I went to sleep. The image that came to me was of Lucia floating in a large plexiglass box across the universe, swishes of stars all around, a beautiful dark sky, a great expanse. I imagined Lucia floating within the box, traveling somewhere. And in my mind, I knew that she needed to stay in the box to stay safe. 

Only when she got to her destination could she safely push open the walls of the box and explore. If she pushed one side of the box to open it before her destination, red lights would flash and a great siren would blare to alert her that she was entering the danger zone. 

As I drifted off to sleep I felt a sense of calm I haven’t in a long time. This teenager parenting gig momentarily made sense to me. Right now I’m the red lights and siren. I have to be the warning signs until Lucia gets to her destination (whenever and wherever that is); until she learns to listen to her own signals. 

I understood that the suitcase I had been trying to squeeze Lucia into was too small and confining. It was too dark and closed and stuffy. 

The image of Lucia in a more expansive galaxy helps me remember that Lucia is going somewhere, maybe somewhere far away. To get where she’s going, she needs to be able to see, to look around, to experience life. There is still a part of me that wants to zip Lucia into a suitcase and release her when her pre-frontal cortex is fully developed, but if I did that we’d both be miserable.

For now, I just have to stick with the idea that for the next little while, as Lucia travels across the universe of adolescence, I can help her by signaling the danger alarm for her. In not too many years I know that she’ll be old enough and wise enough to signal it for herself.