The Bus Windows are Dark

The view from my Desk

“You are the burden of my generation

I sure do love you

But let’s get that straight” Paul Simon, That Was Your Mother

The Wednesday after Labor Day, I watch as Ella unlatches the gate and waves goodbye.

My oldest baby is off to sixth grade.

Blocks down the street she will board a school bus and head down the freeway to middle school. Twenty-five minutes away, I think, as I trudge up the stairs, fighting tears.

Emerson sits in the kitchen eating pancakes and strips of bacon. Is it my imagination or does she look delighted to be rid of her sister? “Come on,” I say. “Let’s watch from the window until her bus goes by.”

“I don’t know if she’ll like that,” says Emerson, with a wise raise of her eyebrows. “That’ll probably embarrass her.”

Too bad, I think. I just want one glimpse.

Minutes later, the bus passes. To my disappointment, the bus windows are dark. I cannot see inside. I don’t risk waving just in case she’s watching.

I’m embarrassing. I understand this.

Ella and I are at an impasse. This awful stage where she’s conversely disgusted by me one moment and childishly needy of my attention the next. The problem is, I never know which Ella she will be at any given moment. In the course of an hour she’s considerate and mature, asking how she can help me with dinner, and the next minute shouting that, “I’ve ruined her life”, as she runs upstairs and slams her bedroom door.

A list of her complaints goes something like this. She hates having divorced parents. She thinks I’ll never make enough money as a writer. She’s embarrassed when adults in our community tell her how much they like my books because it makes her feel invisible.

She hates my hair. “The way you flip it on the ends looks so weird, Mom. It looked so much better when you wore it straight.”

She thinks I always side with Emerson when they’re fighting. And my clothes? Too many horrors to catalogue. I take too many photographs of the cats. I should never, ever, go out of the house without make-up. I’m forgetful. She hates my ‘hillbilly’ music. I drive like an old lady.

Okay, I do take too many photos of the cats. But that’s another blog post.

I’m quite clear that this is all part of raising a tween girl. They’re irrational, emotional. They think everything their mothers do is wrong, embarrassing, ridiculous, square and on and on.

They’re all like this, my friends reassure me. She’ll be back.

And, please don’t get me wrong on this point. Ella is an amazing, bright, insightful, beautiful, sweet girl. I’m proud of her. I adore her. She and her sister are the loves of my life.

But this truth doesn’t really help me, unfortunately. We’re in a tough stage. It hurts when she looks at me like I’m a failure or criticizes my hair or asks if maybe I should consider getting a “real job”. That latter stings the most, as you might imagine, if you know anything about how hard I work to make a living as a writer, albeit a modest one.

She also criticizes me in front of my friends and tells them stories that make me look bad. Sometimes she tells stories or opinions about me that I’m amazed she thinks are even close to the truth. I guess from her eleven year old brain, they are.

I want to say, sometimes, “You know, other people like me. Other people think I’m interesting, not embarrassing.”

But I don’t, of course. We mothers suck it up. We go back to the kitchen and try to make a nutritious meal no one will eat.

I also understand this parenting gig is all about letting go. I know the ways in which she criticizes me are her way of distancing herself so that she can become independent. I know this is how it must be. But it hurts.

When she gets home from her first day of sixth grade, she starts to cry almost immediately. The bus was awful. Overcrowded and ‘bad, older kids’ in the back, talking about inappropriate things. She couldn’t sit with her friend. “I had to sit with boys, Mom, three to a seat.”

Over dinner, she tells me she wishes I’d gone with her to the bus stop. I’m shocked. I thought a mother escorting her sixth grade daughter was without question mortifying.

Scooping a bite of mashed potatoes into her mouth, she looks at me with that face that conveys what an utter disappointment I am.

“There were other parents of sixth graders with their kids,” she says.

“I thought you wouldn’t want me there.”

“Well, I did.”

See? Again, I can’t quite get it right. No matter how much I try to anticipate, to understand – insight into her little brain is as dark as the bus windows. I cannot see inside. The rest of the dinner I fight tears. This feeling – the one where you feel like the worst mother in the world because you read a situation wrong? Well, it’s a bad one. I seem to have it more often than not these days.

Regardless that this is a normal part of Ella’s maturation, I miss the little girl who adored me, the little girl who thought I was pretty and smart and who threw her arms around me when I picked her up from school. I long for the adult she’ll be, the mature woman that will look back and admire how I raised them on my own and refused to live a conventional life at the expense of my happiness, regardless of money.

Right now I’m in the thick of it. And I’m alone. And it’s hard. That’s just the truth.

For me, this is the most difficult stage of parenting thus far. Some of the other stages were pretty rough, including the sleep-deprived infant stage but I loved all of them. No matter how tired I was, I couldn’t stop kissing on my sweet little babies or smelling their little heads. I miss the days when every milestone was an indication that you were not an utter failure instead of this helpless and confused stage I’m currently muddling through.

No, I don’t love this stage. Not one iota. It’s thankless, relentless, frustrating.

Regardless, I love my little girl. I love my tween, no matter how much she tries to push me away. I know we’ll get through this. Someday I’ll tell her stories about it when she calls to complain about her tween. I’ll be gentle, I promise, just as my mother is when I call with my tales of woe.

Last night, after a couple of loads of laundry and dinner dishes and mopping the floor and all the other mother-tasks my friends and I do every night, I drag myself into the family room to watch a show with the girls. My eyes are itchy and tired. I can’t wait to fall into bed, knowing that tomorrow brings another school day and deadliness and bills to pay.

We watch a show with Emerson snuggled next to me on the couch. Ella is at the other end with a pillow in her lap.

After a few minutes, I laugh at something on the show – my loud, belly laugh when something really amuses me.

“I love it when you laugh like that, Mom. It makes me feel happy,” says Ella.

I look at her, surprised. She’s smiling at me like she likes me a little. Just a little. I can almost find the small girl she used to be.

Let this sustain you, I tell myself. It’s something. Something nice, no matter what tomorrow brings.