Turtle and Teen

            I’d moved out to the screened in porch to read in my circle of light.  Out she comes.  “Mom,” she says, testing the waters, I forgot to show you a picture I took this afternoon.  Reluctantly, I’d let her go to For-Mar (a local arboretum) to meet a bi-polar friend with whom she’s enamored and who is the subject of her book on friendship and “mental disorders” because “that’s what teens are interested in.”  She brings up the photo on her phone and hands it to me.  A snapping turtle hovers close to the surface of the pond surrounded by orange “goldfish,” but the reflections of clouds on the water make it seem like the pond is the heavens and he’s swimming both in and out of his element at the same time.  “Oh, it’s a lovely picture,” I tell her, keeping aloof, keeping up my silent treatment.

            “We had an agreement,” I said in my first message, “4:00.”  She isn’t answering her phone, and I call again, having borrowed a phone from one of the student workers in the Nature Center.  “I’m torn between worry and anger, but you better get your butt up here fast.”  She tells me a lot, so I know the weirdness of this boy, I know he likes her, I know he smokes pot, and I know he has been picked up by the police for wandering around after curfew going through dumpsters.  Crazy images pass through my mind, but mainly I am angry.  Breathless and with soaking wet feet, she’s back at the car forty minutes late without the boy, who slunk away, afraid to meet a mother.

            I listen to her excuses, speak in brief, angry sentences, but there are things she says that move me.  She explains that she told Ryan two days ago that this wasn’t a date.  She reads me a text.  “Look, I need to take it slow.  There are four guys trying to get with me right now, and I am evaluating each one very carefully and trying not to make the same mistakes I’ve made before, getting into ‘friends with benefits’ too soon.”  OMG these are my words of advice differently worded.  I smile inwardly thinking that maybe she listens, that maybe my efforts to guide her are not for naught.

            I talk about boundaries.  I talk about agreements.  I talk about respect.  What I can’t bear to talk about was the “date” itself.  “He was nice to hang out with,” she says, placing sweetness like a life-saver inside the bitterness of an argument I was driving.  Later on, I get more details as she tries to explain how a heavy conversation made them “lose track of time.”  “Well, we walked back to the hill where you like to go and sat down under a tree.”  I know that old tree.  I touch it when I’m weak.  I pray in its direction.  It is an orienting pole—an axis mundi.  And although I am conscious of a big emptiness … so little time for pleasure in my life and no one to walk and talk with in that intense teen-age kind of way, I admire my daughter’s choice of spot.  I don’t tell her but it feels nice to recognize her shared desire for closeness—not just to a boy but to nature.  I thought that I’d failed to instill that, but it must be there inside of her, and it came out of hiding when I least expected it.  Like the turtle … I’m trying to let her go, let her swim in her element, and find, to my delight that she’s also swimming in mine. 

            Ryan was almost an hour late for their meeting.  “Mom, I almost called you to come get me, but I figured I’d walk down to the pond to look for the snapping turtles.  I got into watching them and talking to the people on the dock.”  Before I adopted Katya, I would walk in For-Mar every day.  As long as I could, I carried her in a backpack and fed her baby food in the parking lot.  Once she was a toddler, I tried to get her to go with me:  “let’s go visit the snapping turtles.”  I used them as bait.  Seeing them was always surprising—even though it became a regular event.  How could they sense the presence of humans, and why did they surface and move close?  Was it expectation of food—we obeyed the sign “do not feed the animals”—or some other mysterious impulse?

            Because of our history with these turtles, Katya’s photo means way more to me than I let on.  That old turtle up from the bottom of the pond connects mother and daughter and helpfully carries the wonder of childhood into the emotional tumult of teenage experiences.  But it also reminds me that while it may be in the nature of all creatures to leave the mother, there exists an impulse toward connectivity that is just as strong.  In this mini crisis, I rejected Katya, but she kept lifting her head above the water and using her flipper fins to push aside the clouds.  I wonder why it is so easy to transpose a line from its romantic context in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream to this situation where it perfectly describes old and new love I feel for her:  “I have found my daughter like a jewel, my own and not my own.”