Love is so much like death

Certain

Absolute

And out of our control

The future is always blissfully photoshopped.

We’re always a few pounds lighter, a few brain cells smarter, and soaked with life experience and healthy logic.

The sad reality is, you never grow up to be who you’d imagined yourself as.

Through adolescence and my twenties, I thought I’d be the best mother in the world. Motherhood was the end game, the goal, the quest. I was so acutely aware of the mistakes my own parents had made with me, and I vowed to be perfect.

From the outside, parenting looked almost easy. Whoever said it doesn’t come with a guidebook was wrong. There were dozens of thick, helpful books—all of which I read while pregnant with Daria—and a few principles I thought were vital for success:

Don’t raise your voice to your kid.

Don’t lose your shit (see: number one).

Give them space.

Trust them.

Encourage their independence.

Shower them with love and gratitude, and they will grow up to be good humans.

I was bullied into becoming a ballerina by parents who wanted their daughter to be everything my mother couldn’t afford to be. So when Daria came along, and I saw from a very young age that she was spirited, rebellious, and full of the same anger her father harbored—raw fierceness that couldn’t be contained—I didn’t push her to follow my footsteps. Ballet, after all, is harsh and demanding. I always made sure she knew she wasn’t expected to be like me. But it seemed like the more choice I gave her—the harder she tried to prove me wrong.

I wonder where it all went wrong while folding the kids’ clothes in the laundry room. Doing the laundry is not a task I need to do with the amount of help I get around the house, but it’s a telling job when you raise teenagers.

I can see, smell, and find all their secrets.

I found Daria’s pompom string in Penn’s back pocket. Penn’s mouthguard in the pocket of Daria’s cardigan. There is still a resistant bubblegum-pink lipstick stain that refuses to leave one of Penn’s shirts. A lipstick I know belongs to my daughter. Bailey’s clothes are always full of mud—she rolls with Lev, our neighbor, on the hills of El Dorado. Via is the only one who is careful not to show where she’s been. She is, therefore, the kid I know who hides the most.

She thinks she is fooling us. But the fact of the matter is, I let her get away with her behavior because she’s been through so much.

I stop when I get to Daria’s pajama dress. It is sticky and heavier than the rest of the clothes as though it’s not completely dried. I turn it around and sniff—a mother always sniffs her kids’ clothes—and it smells like aloe.

Why would she put aloe all over her behind?

Clutching the fabric in my fist, I leave the laundry room to ask her just that.

Over the past few months, I’ve been begging for crumbs of her attention, knowing somewhere deep inside me that I don’t deserve them. I’ve failed her one too many times. She always seemed so strong and opinionated, and I made the gravest mistake a parent could. I treated her like an equal.

But Daria is not my equal. She is my daughter. My very sensitive daughter. She’s been hurting beyond belief recently. I’ve done nothing to rectify this situation, only escalating it by bringing in more factors that drove us apart.

I make my way toward her room and stop when I hear my husband’s voice behind her door. “Of course, you can tell me, Dar. You know there’s no judgment inside these walls.”

Frozen, my jaw slacks. A part of me, the logical part, tells me to turn around and walk away. She is confiding in Jaime, not me. But another part—the mother in me—refuses to let go. I resent my own husband for having a superior connection with her. I resent the entire world, including Bailey, and Via, and Penn, and our friends for coming between Daria and me.

“Principal Prichard hit me.”

The air leaves my lungs, and I stumble backward. Silence. My husband recovers after what seems to be like a full minute.

“Tell me everything, please.” His voice is barely restrained.

She does. My daughter spends the next ten minutes chronicling her last, scarring, infuriating four years. She doesn’t leave anything out. Not the fact she destroyed Via’s letter—something I knew but never confronted her about—to how she started writing in the journal, and how Prichard used it against her. She breaks down when she confesses to deleting Grace’s messages in New York. Not that I needed to hear it from her to know it to be true. I figured it out when I finally found Grace’s number and called her. By that point, I could hardly blame Daria. I was a no-show for the past six months of her life. Too busy saving Via and Penn and giving Bailey everything she needs. The way I saw it, until the New York incident—my own wake-up call, if you will—I was staying out of her way, just as she had asked me to do repeatedly.

Daria always seemed so distant and independent as if she had it all figured out. How could I have been so stupid?

Daria acts like eighteen-year-old Mel. Dazed, confused, and hurt.

In New York, when Bailey and Via fawned over me, and Daria awarded me with long yawns, I did what I always do when I get frustrated with her; I built up an ice wall from the same variety she raised every time I came knocking on the doors of her heart.

I shouldn’t have built more walls.

I should’ve broken them down.

Smashed them and stormed in and given her everything she needed so she wouldn’t have to search for them in an abusive educator who took advantage of her.

I hear my daughter crying in her room and muster the courage to tiptoe and peek through the slit in the door. They are so quiet and content and wrecked together. My beautiful, perfect husband sits on the edge of my daughter’s bed, hugging her close to his chest and kissing the crown of her blond head. She is falling apart in his arms, and my heart hurts so much I can’t even breathe.

I should be hugging you.

I should be comforting you.

Collapsing against the wall, I suck in air. Sourness rises in my throat, and I swallow it down, but it keeps coming up, wanting to spill over. I want to purge whatever’s inside me on the floor. All the frustration and hate and animosity toward the person I gave birth to. This has been going on for far too long. I need my baby back.

“Daddy?”

“Yes, the love of my life?”

The love of his life. I know he means it. Jaime would die just to put a smile on his mini-me’s face.

“I can’t stay here, you know. I’m not going to let Penn throw the game, and I won’t be able to show my face at school after the journal goes public.”

“It’ll never come to that. I will hit Gus up tonight.”

“No.” I hear Daria sniff and know she is shaking her head. She’s made up her mind. “It’s too late. My reputation is shit. If the truth comes out, people will know I killed All Saints High’s chance at taking the championship, and Gus and Via will spin it against me. Besides…” She takes another deep breath. I know why. I know because I fold their clothes and tuck their secrets into their closets every day.

“I need to put some distance between the Scullys and me.”