I Am Trying Really Hard Not to Let My Daughter’s Breakup Turn Me Into a Monster

I could sense the thought hovering, slinking its way sideways like a floater across your field of vision. I knew that letting it slip to the center meant I’d be up for hours. My daughter had broken up with her boyfriend, and it had turned me into an insomniac.

It wasn’t a traumatic situation. They got along well, and he adored her. M’s first real relationship—long-distance during her senior year at college, then blossoming when the pandemic sent her abruptly home without a graduation (all circumstances, no pomp)—had been a good one. She had just recognized the implications of a lack of depth of feeling, and had the courage to act on it. Taking advantage of the pandemic convenience of remote therapy, she cried her way across Manhattan, walking and talking about her gnawing doubts and growing conviction.

Timing is never right for a breakup, but she felt especially burdened at the start of summer as the two of them flew together back to Seattle. Her graduation and her big brother’s wedding had both been canceled in that one grim ping-pong week in March of 2020—blame it on the NBA—but two years later the wedding was back on, and she’d be a bridesmaid in lilac, and her boyfriend would be a groomsman in a gray tuxedo. I alone knew that she was poised to break it off, but she gamely made the time at home about her brother and new sister-in-law, and if the boyfriend knew that things were fraying, he still smiled broadly through all the wedding events and danced to “Mr. Brightside” at the reception.

I scroll through the pictures of them on my phone and the tears fall. I feel the familiar ache in my gut and weakness in my forearms, and somewhere register the transference. This isn’t my heartbreak, right? Put the phone down, shake your head, plump the pillow. Sleep …

To say my daughter’s decision was unpopular is to put it mildly. The whole extended family found the boyfriend uniquely lovable, and we all had a luxurious exposure to him during the pandemic, that way it had of grounding travelers and slowing time itself. The larger group spent more time together that first year or so—in fragile bubbles inside, or liberated outdoors—than we had in years, and even if I was anxious and vaguely guilty about my email-job privilege, my “30 years on the working-mother treadmill” brain recognized that I was finally getting that vaunted but elusive “quality time.” My own view into my daughter’s burgeoning romance was artificially close up, as they lived with me in our WFH bubble. I got to watch them learn about each other and cosplay adulting, trying out recipes for scallops and jalapeno margaritas, playing cornhole on a dock, settling in to binge a show under a blanket.

We get close to our children’s people. When they’re little, we wipe their noses, make them popcorn at sleepovers, drive them to games and birthday parties and the Little Gym, and become friends with their parents on the soccer pitch sidelines and the second-grade potlucks. We experience the shifting alliances and fallings-out, see the anguish of the parents whose kid isn’t part of the crowd anymore, and feel it ourselves during middle school mean-girl drama. Our kids won’t understand until they are parents themselves—the love we feel for their friends, their partners, the attachments we form, the bonus parenting we do.

I loved her boyfriend’s dimples and optimism. Felt his warmth and easy affection, his loping walk and lack of guile. If, on occasion, I noted that she was quicker and funnier than him, that his references to “mom and dad” without the possessive pronoun grated on her, and was briefly stunned to learn—walking past the Dakota on Central Park West—that this valedictorian and business school grad had never heard of Yoko Ono, I was mostly charmed and proud of her for choosing so sweetly.

He was an easy fit for the family, and we were eager to welcome him. Her aunts and I hovered protectively, since her dad had died when she was in high school, and we had worried, prior to this relationship, about her seeming disdain toward boys and men. Her father had loved her deeply but had nonetheless let her down. When she was young and he was not yet fully in the thrall of his addiction to alcohol, he had made her Eggo waffles, put her hair into uneven ponytails, walked her to school. But she had trouble remembering those days and had committed to memory the playbook from Family Support Week at rehab. She held firm to her boundaries and threw his sobriety tokens back at him after each fresh relapse that deepened their intermittent estrangement. She was frank and resistant to easy sentiment. She didn’t need others to validate her own experience and didn’t deify him, kept to her clear-eyed view, identified the privilege in the security of her home and relationship with me, and refused to play—as she wryly called it—the Dead Dad card.

So we were—I was—perhaps too eager to celebrate the softening we saw in her in this new and lighthearted relationship. Her boyfriend was intact and suburban and unmarred. It was a marvel to me that she made him sandwiches. I added a chunky hand-knit Christmas stocking to the mantel for him and stuffed it with the things I had learned that he loved. During their year together in New York, he texted me pictures of her, raving about how pretty she looked with the waves in her hair from the humidity, in masks on the subway, cooing at her cousin’s new baby. In a text with three diamond emojis he said she was a gem and he couldn’t believe how lucky he was. They talked about a winter wedding at Whistler.

My son was happily settled, and my daughter was now closer to marriage than I had been in the 15 years since my marriage had fallen apart. I could squint and see how their lives would play out, and that gave me the coherence I craved but hadn’t been able to replicate or to create anew. My first love story had ended in tragedy—my regret permanently marked with a headstone—but my daughter’s story would have a happy ending. This was generational progress. This would heal us all.

But. She wanted out. She was ready to move on. I could hardly bear the thought of his broken heart, but my daughter felt what she described as “pure relief” in finally telling him. In the months after they split up, I was bereft, grieving, agonizing over whether and how to communicate. Do I send his parents a gift at Christmas? Try to see him when he’s in town? He has a leap-year birthday, is technically 7 instead of 27. I don’t even know if he knows she’s been seeing someone else. How do I make sure he’s OK?

I don’t. He is. Or, if he isn’t, he will be.

Somewhere inside, I knew I had weirdly made this about me. Outwardly, I said the right things, but she saw right through it. I didn’t even have to take the hint; she was forthright. Told me plainly that she was getting more support from her friends than from her family, that we had made her feel like a villain, dismissing her legitimate reservations and acting as though she had been merely bored. What is it with this new generation and their naïve insistence on emotional regulation and direct communication? They didn’t get the memo we did about stifling our true selves and needs and pretending everything is OK.

I straightened up. Wiped away my misplaced overprotective but ultimately self-regarding tears. She is not defined by losing her father—first gradually, then suddenly and with finality. She is not the men she will let in, nor the men she will walk away from. I think of Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady, stubbornly free to choose. I need to take a page out of that book. Out of hers. It was time for me to get some sleep.