My youngest daughter was born in a test tube. Or if not born in one, she had the required ingredients put in one, spun around, tipped on its head and then she finally came together just fine. As a 16-year-old, this is a process she seems to repeat with some measure of regularity.
She would be considered elegant by any definition but also coarse, transparent and someone who expects to be treated and dealt with both elegantly and transparently. She is fiercely loyal to her friends, looks for opportunities to defend them and has high expectations for those expecting to drift into her inner circle. While she drifts across friend groups with ease--athletes, dancers, jocks, the slightly burnt, white collars, blue collars and those eschewing collars altogether, she rides with only a select few and even fewer have access to her vaults and odd calibrations. This is one of things that makes her unique, makes her special, her ability to stay on guard and keep her feelings under surveillance, even while she portrays, to the outside world at least, that all is manageable and under-control and fine.
As all teenagers eventually come to terms with, and with which parents are acutely aware, fine can be fleeting. One day your Iced Matcha Green Tea Latte is perfectly blended. You nail a Trig test. You score a goal or two in practice. Your boyfriend seems less like a dick than he was the day before. You have something for dinner that doesn’t offend you. You finish your homework early and your parents leave you the fuck alone. The next day you’re late for school. Your yogurt leaks into your Copas. Your minutes on the pitch drop, and the accumulating burden of AP classes, the feeling that friends aren’t real friends and that your troubles are the most troubling, bears down on you and shades so much light, that all you can see is dark. You can’t see that everyone, at varying intervals, is caught in the blank space between 16 and fine.
And even through it, even through those periods of lightless dark, my youngest has some piece of spark that always seems to cling. You see it in the way she purses her lips or raises a single eyebrow at the same time she curls the opposite corner of her mouth. You can see it in the way she keeps moving forward even when she says she’s absolutely going to stay put. In the way she does what can be the single most difficult thing to do but is always the most important; she shows up. And in showing up, in bringing that clinging spark to whatever it is that’s gnawing at her, she allows herself the opportunity to find fine.
I watched her the other day as she was sitting on the couch next to me. We had just finished a writing assignment. She came with a good outline and we talked a bit about it, and I was happy to help sand its edges. We finished and she was happy. Her smile came on slowly, as it does, but then took over her face. Rolling up from her mouth to her nose (which is just exactly perfect no thanks to the noses up and down our family trees) then across her forehead. In her smile you can easily find fine, and even happy. But also, there in that smile, are the typical concerns built into standard 16-year old operating protocol. Things like tomorrow's AP Language test, tomorrow’s soccer game, tomorrow’s ride to school, tomorrow’s halftime football jig. Tomorrows rob from our todays but that, too, is to be expected. At 16, you don’t allow yourself too much time to enjoy any one thought, or any one experience: there’s always something coming to dread. I wish I could show her the future and explain how things end up rolling into place exactly how they’re supposed to, but I’m too old to offer anything but old words and she’s too young to believe them, at least now.
When she went to bed that night after we talked about the hope for her birthday party and we negotiated acceptable terms (these friends only, no boys staying over, no driving), she was curled up in her bed distracting herself, from herself, on her phone. I said good night, and that I love you, and I asked if she was ok with her homework and she said it was fine. I almost challenged it, but decided to take it at face value and went to bed, thankful that I had a daughter working through what being 16 means on her own terms and grateful, fine even, with the person she’s becoming