Sturdy Enough

I have traveled all my life. Nationally, internationally. By plane, by boat, by train. In groups, with family, alone. I know how to move through the world - how to read a departures board in a language I don't speak, how to talk my way onto an earlier flight (well not lately don’t get excited), how to sit still in an airport for six hours without losing my mind. Solo travel, in particular, I am good at. I trust my instincts. I make a decision and I move.

None of that prepared me for traveling with my seventeen-year-old daughter.

It's not the itinerary that's hard. It's not the packing or the layovers or the inevitable gate change. It's that she questions me - my route, my timing, my read on a situation - and I feel myself second-guessing decisions I would otherwise make without a flicker of doubt. Decades of competence, and one raised eyebrow from someone I love can still unsteady me.

For a while I told myself a tidy story about why: she pushes on me because I'm safe. Somewhere I read - or maybe just decided - that this is how it works. A teenager on the edge of leaving needs to test whether her own judgment is allowed to exist next to someone else's. She needs proof that she can disagree with me and the relationship still holds. I am, in that story, something like a trellis - not the target of the pushing, just the sturdy thing she's growing against. A trellis doesn't take it personally when the vine pushes on it. The pushing is the point. It's how the vine finds its own shape.

I still think that's true. I've watched enough people, in enough kinds of grief and change, to trust that pattern. It probably is safer to test your own compass against someone who loves you unconditionally than against a stranger who won't. In a year she'll be making these calls with professors and roommates and people who don't already know her heart. Right now, she gets to rehearse on me.

But the real part I don't want to skip past, is the part that lives underneath the theory: I wanted to be her friend (I know, I know…this will come later when she is an adult…I just need to be kind and true and dependable…but we are not in the future…we are in the present) And instead of being a friend…, I am the one she rails against, precisely because I am safe enough to rail against. And even though the explanation is true. It is NOT quite a comfort. It doesn't erase the ache of watching your child brace against you instead of leaning into you - even when you understand exactly why, even when some clinical, pastoral part of you knows it's healthy and expected and even a little bit an honor.

I don't think that tension resolves. I'm not sure it's supposed to. Whatever it is that I imagined I would be to her… I am her safe target instead, and I don't fully know how to feel about that yet.

What I do know is where breath comes in.

There is a half-second, on a train platform or in a rental car or standing in a security line, when she questions a decision I've already made - and I feel the whole old instinct rise up to defend it, or worse, to cave just to keep the peace. That half-second is where the practice actually lives. Not in the itinerary. Not in being right about the gate. In the breath between her challenge and whatever I do next. One breath, and I can choose whether I'm defending my competence or making room for hers.

Somewhere in my body, I can feel exactly where this lands - a tightening in the jaw, a held breath, a flush of something that wants to prove itself. I've learned, slowly, to notice that before I act from it. That's not a travel skill. It's the same skill I'd ask anyone to practice with a parent, a partner, anyone whose questioning of you cuts closer than a stranger's ever could.

I used to think I was only good at traveling alone. I'm starting to think that's not quite it. Solo travel and companioned travel are two different skills, and I've simply spent forty years building one of them and only just started building the other. That's not failure. That's just where I am - a beginner, again, at something I thought I'd already mastered.

She only pushes back because she's watching that closely. Because she trusts me enough to test her own read against mine. Because she is, in her own way, getting ready to leave — and something in both of us already knows it.

I don't have a clean ending for this one. Just this: I am learning to breathe through being loved in a form I didn't expect, on my way to a departure neither of us is ready for yet.