No One Tells You What Having a Grown Child Will Do to You as a Mom

When I was 14, I fell madly in love with a boy who sometimes, for a few hours, seemed to love me back (though never as much as I loved him). Most of the time he paid no attention to me. Or paid me the littlest bit of attention possible—pausing to talk for a minute in the hall between classes, or walking by but telling me that I looked good, or just nodding at me as I walked by where he stood talking with his friends. Enough to make my heart race. Enough to keep me hopeful. Then he’d go right back to ignoring me for days or weeks. Or months.

A lot of things have changed in the half-century that’s passed since then. I stopped letting boys (then men) treat me badly. I stopped falling for bad, cool, heedless guys; instead, I married a good one. I started writing books instead of sad love poems; I became a college professor, an advice columnist, a college professor emerita. I had a child and we were thick as thieves and then she grew up, left home, started a career. Married her own good guy. Began a second, new, more rewarding and more taxing career. She’s 30 and she has her own full, complex life—she’s busy. In what slivers of downtime she has, there are friends to see, interests to pursue, trips to take. Sleep to catch up on. My texts to her start to pile up. Weeks pass—months pass—between phone calls.

Don’t text her, I tell myself. You texted her the other day—don’t send another text.

And then: If you must text her, keep it short. Don’t overwhelm her.

And when she texts to say, “I have time to talk today around 5—do you want to?” I remind myself: Don’t sound too excited, don’t text back, “Yes!!!! 🎉 😅 🎡 ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️.” I collect myself. I text: “Sure, sounds good.”

When I was in love with that boy, Russell, I Scotch-taped notes around my room (it was 1969—Post-its had yet to be invented) that said DO NOT CALL HIM! and WAIT FOR HIM TO CALL YOU!!! The note on the red Trimline phone that lived on the windowsill beside my bed read, DON’T TOUCH THAT DIAL! When he called me—out of the blue—as he sometimes did, my heart would pound wildly. I would think, Be cool, be cool, be cool. Don’t ask him what he’s doing later. Or tomorrow, or this weekend. Do NOT tell him you miss him. Don’t be pathetic, don’t make a big deal of this. Don’t scare him off.

My daughter almost never calls without texting me first, so I always have a minute or two (or the long hours till 5 p.m.) to compose myself, to make sure I don’t sound manically overjoyed. A teeny tiny little bit of joy is all right, I think—after all, I want her to know I’m happy to talk to her. But not that I’m over the moon.

It’s tricky, I admit. I want my voice to convey that I am slightly above the Earth, but I am squarely under the moon.

With Russell, all those years ago, I made lists of things that I might talk to him about if he did call. Then, when the blessed event happened, I’d flip the pages of the notebook I kept right next to the phone to find the most recent one—the only way I could be sure I wouldn’t panic and go mute. On the list were anecdotes and thoughts I’d had that I was pretty sure (though never altogether sure; he kept me on my toes) would interest him. Things that had happened lately that seemed to be the kinds of things that he found funny. Gossip about “friends” I knew he didn’t like. Carefully thought-out opinions about records—the relative merits of Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty, what the best song was on Abraxas—that I’d been listening to over and over alone in my room, at least in part because I knew that wherever he was, he was listening to them too. Not on the list: Anything I might be sad about. How fervently I wished he was thinking about me as much as I was thinking about him. Joni Mitchell, Laura Nyro, D.H. Lawrence—anything I thought would bore him or that he would disapprove of.

I try hard not to bore my daughter either. Sometimes, when we’re on the phone, I realize that I must be boring her—talking about people she has never met, or about a movie I’ve seen that I think would be up her alley—and I change the subject, fast. Sometimes (occasionally, OK? And only if it’s been a really long time since we’ve talked) I’ll use the Notes app on my phone to jot down a list of news items—a grant her father or I have been awarded, or some exciting thing that’s happened at the studio where I dance every day, or maybe just a recipe I tried out that I think she’d like too—and questions that I don’t want to forget to ask as they pile up, like, How was your trip to LA? And How’s Sergeant Pepper (my grandpuppy, if you please)? And Did any of the clothes I sent you from that last clothes swap I hosted end up fitting? Do you like them? Are you glad/grateful/annoyed that I sent them? (No—scratch that last one.)

I watch every TV show or movie Grace suggests to me. If I love it (Eighth Grade, Girls5eva), she seems genuinely pleased. If I don’t find it as delightful as she does (the recent A League of Her Own series, Sex Education), she seems so disappointed in me that I wish I hadn’t told her. But it’s thanks to her that I discovered the band Delta Rae, first listened to Kesha, joined a choir, bought an air fryer, became a devotee of the dip manicure.

In other words: At this point in our three-decade-long relationship, she has a greater influence on me than I do on her. I’m more interested in what she thinks than she is in what I think. I’m more interested in what she does than she has ever been in what I do (she will, I assure you, never read this essay). And it is incontrovertible, a truth self-evident, that I need her more—far more—than she needs me.

I’d feel worse about this if almost every parent I know who has a grown child they adore wasn’t in the same boat. Or the same-ish boat. My friend Louise (I’ve changed some of the names in this essay) told me she was thrilled when her 24-year-old son called at 10:30 p.m. on April 15 to ask how to pay his taxes. My friend Anna told me that when she realized the eclipse would fall on a day when her two younger kids were scheduled to be with their dad, she called her eldest, Rory—only recently out of the house and on their own—to ask what they would be doing that day, “and Rory said, ‘Oh, some friends and I are going to drive out to see it.’ And I get that,” Anna told me. “No one in their 20s wants their mom rolling out with their friends.” On the day, though, Anna was talking on the phone with her middle child, out eclipse-watching with her dad and younger sister. “And I heard a familiar laugh in the background. I said, ‘Is that RORY?’ Yup. Plans with friends fell through. So Rory went to the apple farm with their dad and sisters and never said a word to me. And just telling you that story, I’m hurt all over again.”

When I tell my husband how much I miss Grace, he likes to say, “Which Grace?” And he’s right: There are so many. I miss them all. I miss the baby, whom I remember perfectly—the feeling of her in my arms, the way she’d shriek with joy when I danced her around the living room to Wham!—and I miss the tiny child she was in the mid-’90s, sweeping the floor with the child-sized broom she’d requested for Christmas, singing “It’s A Hard Knock Life” at the top of her lungs. I miss the adorable, infuriating, determined-to-be-all-grown-up preteen; the high-strung high school student, so smart and so serious—a girl who would never have suffered a fool the way I did at that age. I miss the let’s-pretend games we played when she was a little girl, watching Buffy with her, just sitting and talking.

I miss talking to her every day at every single age she ever was.

But I get it. She’s living her own life now, miles away. She’s not ignoring me. She’s just not thinking about me the way I think of her. Which is as it should be. She’s not like my bad high school boyfriend. It’s me. I’m the problem. I swear, I’m doing the best I can.

I think sometimes about the moment it occurred to me that my mother might be suffering, missing me. I was 46 years old, walking the dog after dropping Grace off at school. She’d done something that morning—I don’t recall what (shrugged off a have-a-good-day hug? Yanked her head away when I tried to kiss her goodbye? Maybe just called me “Mom” instead of “Mama,” because her friends were listening?)—that had reminded me that my 8-year-old would one day be grown and gone, and it hit me hard. And all at once I thought of my mother, 500 miles away in New York, hearing from me maybe once a month. Not calling me because she didn’t want to “bother” me.

So I called her, then and there. While I walked the dog. And then I called her every morning while I walked the dog for the length of that dog’s life. Then I switched to calling while I unpacked groceries, or cooked, or walked to the dance studio. It makes her so happy, and takes so little effort from me.

But it wouldn’t have worked if she’d had to ask me for it. I admire her for not asking—for not even hinting. For playing it so cool.

Last Christmas was the first ever that my kid wouldn’t be coming home at all. She had only three days off of work, and so they had to institute an alternate-holiday plan: This year they would spend it with her husband’s family in Texas. She broke the news to me over the phone in September, soon after she’d started her new job. In previous years they’d dropped off their pets (Sergeant Pepper and my grand–bearded dragon, Rubber Soul) at our house on the way to Texas and spent a few days with each family; this year, she said, they’d get someone to stay in their apartment to care for the animals. I said, “Good idea.”

By the next day I’d had my own idea—a great idea, I thought. We could fly to New York, a few days before they left for Christmas in Texas. We could stay at a hotel near their apartment, have an early Christmas with them—I could even cook!—and then, while they were in Texas, we could say at their place and take care of the pets.

I knew better than to share this excellent idea with her. It would be just another in a too-long list of times when I have been “too much,” when I have overwhelmed her with the sheer force of my love. So I kept quiet. I am very proud of this. There is little that is harder for me than staying quiet. There is even less that’s harder for me than not jumping in to solve a problem. And nothing—nothing, I tell you—that’s harder than bypassing an opportunity to see my daughter.

A month later, she called and said, “I have a huge favor to ask of you. And really it’s perfectly OK if you say no, because I know this is a lot to ask. But none of our friends can stay at our place over Christmas, they’re all leaving town, so I’m wondering if you’d be able to? You could come out here a little bit before Christmas, and we could even have an early celebration together before we leave.”

Did I whoop for joy? Did I say, “Ho ho ho, I had that very idea weeks ago!” No, I did not.

I said—be cool, be cool—“Hmm, that sounds like it might be a possibility. Let me check with your father and then call you back.”

And then I whooped, did a little dance around the living room, told her father (check with him? Who even am I?), and booked our flights. And a hotel room. And called her back and said, very calmly, “OK, we’ll be there.”

I’m not talking about “faking it till you make it.” I’m not pretending to be chill, cool, collected, in hopes of one day actually feeling chill, cool, collected—well under the moon. I’m not talking about faking, period. I’m talking about reading the room. I’m talking about assessing the situation and handling it the way the person I love most needs me to handle it.

And when it’s hard, as it almost always is, I remind myself that I’m still giving love, still giving my daughter what she needs. If I’d known enough to do that as a teenager—if I’d ever stopped to think about it—it might have occurred to me that Russell didn’t need anything from me. That “loving” him was all about me: what I needed—what I thought I needed—from him. I wasn’t on his mind at all.

That’s the difference between my having a bad boyfriend and my having a grown daughter. It isn’t that she’s never thinking of me. It’s that she wants not to, most of the time. She’s determined not to need her mother. It’s part of the transition to her life as a full-grown adult.

And she wishes (or she thinks she wishes?) I’d stop thinking about her so much. She never says it, but I sometimes feel like I can hear her thinking, Get a life.

I have a life, I want to say. I just miss you. I just love you more than anything in all the world.

I don’t say it. Of course I don’t say it, I know better.

Besides, she already knows. She takes it for granted. And I don’t blame her for taking it for granted—it’s what I wanted for her. It’s what I believe—oh, I mean this from the bottom of my heart—every child should have. Have, and hold with them all their lives. It’s what I hope every mother wants, deep down—that her children know they’re loved, and know that there’s nothing they need to do to prove worthy of it.

And while I would sorely love to talk to her more often, I don’t want a dutiful daily call. It’s a conundrum, I admit. What I want is for her to want to talk to me as much as I want to talk to her. And she doesn’t, yet. She shouldn’t, at her age. Will she ever feel differently? Maybe so. Maybe once she has a child of her own (I don’t think the child will be named for a Beatles album, but she’s made no promises). I’m not rushing her, mind you. But I can’t wait to find out.