“You don’t understand me at all!”
The door slammed shut, and I leaned against it in defeat. This wasn’t the first time a discussion with my teenage daughter about her messy room escalated into chaos. After moving from New York City to our house upstate due to COVID-19, our previously close relationship started to fray. Conversations felt awkward on good days and explosive on worse ones. At one point, she isolated herself in her room for 12 hours straight, and I had to use a screwdriver to check on her while she slept. We may have escaped the city’s turmoil, but it was clear we had created our own storm at home. For the first time, I felt completely lost.
Internally, we all carry the childlike beliefs we formed growing up. Mine was that I was never good enough as I was. A single disapproving glance from my father could send me into a spiral of shame. I learned to meet his expectations, but in doing so, I lost sight of my own needs. It wasn’t until years later that I realized the importance of being truly known—by myself and by others.
In contrast, my journey as a parent with my first daughter was effortless. I was committed to prioritizing her needs, and our bond flourished as a result. We were that picture-perfect mother-daughter duo—sharing laughter in grocery stores, reveling in inside jokes, and planning adventures like waking up at dawn to visit a Gilmore Girls pop-up café. I learned TikTok dances for her and hosted countless sleepovers. For a long time, she even wanted me to sing her to sleep.
However, during our yearly trips to Burma, a friendship blossomed between her and a former political prisoner I knew. One day, he surprised me by saying, “She might not always want to come here.” It struck me for the first time that she might choose her own path, perhaps leaving behind the trips that had meant so much to us.
Her frustration boiled over one day when I suggested she change her study spot from her darkened bed to a desk. “You don’t get it! You never have!” she yelled, knowing those words would cut deep.
One day, after she finally left her room, we stumbled upon a swan gracefully gliding across a lake. I mentioned its beauty, only to be met with her sharp retort. “Swans? Seriously? You think I want to look at a swan? You are so clueless.” She stormed ahead, and back at home, we found ourselves at an impasse. “Where do we go from here?” I asked, realizing she had no answer. Clad in an oversized Harry Styles sweatshirt, she shot me a look filled with disdain before slamming her bedroom door. This wasn’t just typical teenage angst; it was a manifestation of deeper struggles exacerbated by the pandemic.
The next day, while scrolling through Facebook, I discovered my local “Buy Nothing” group, a national initiative encouraging sharing instead of buying. The requests I initially saw were light-hearted—someone needed a pirate costume, another was looking for a board game. However, as COVID-19 continued, the posts began to reflect a profound sense of community. Members offered everything from a free pumpkin pie to legal advice for someone navigating divorce. One poignant post came from a woman who wanted a carpet to dull the sound of her neighbor’s noise. She received not only rugs but also noise-canceling headphones, which helped her manage her PTSD.
The kindness I encountered in the Buy Nothing group became a stark contrast to the isolating world during the pandemic. I was consumed by my patients’ fears and the challenges of my children’s online schooling. After losing my fifth colleague to COVID, someone offered a brand-new vibrator with the caption: “self-care takes all forms during a crisis.” The group became a refuge, a place where compassion and support flourished amid chaos.
As the pandemic unfolded, I realized that we too needed to evolve. My relationship with my daughter had always been shadowed by my childhood fears—my identity was tied to my father’s approval. I spent years striving for his validation, often at the expense of my own happiness. When I finally chose not to pursue law school, his disappointment hit me like a punch in the gut. It took years of therapy to disentangle my self-worth from his expectations.
I believed that by encouraging my daughter to express her emotions, I was giving her a different experience from my own. Yet, I discovered that I had merely swapped one identity for another: I had transformed from a dutiful daughter into an overbearing mother. My desire for closeness with her became more about my needs than hers.
It dawned on me that her anger wasn’t the issue; it was my own need to save her from a fate I had barely escaped. But her journey was hers to forge, not mine to dictate. My expectations were just as burdensome to her as my father’s had been to me. Unlike me, she wasn’t about to submit to them easily.
“I’m trying—I really am trying to understand you,” I confessed one day, sitting at the foot of her bed.
“I just don’t want you to know me anymore,” she replied. “I don’t even know myself!” She was right.
The day after Thanksgiving, I asked the Buy Nothing group for a wishbone. My daughter and I used to cherish that tradition with my mother. After a quick pickup, I returned home with the wishbone wrapped in a paper towel, expecting her to dismiss it. Instead, she lit up. “I want to make a wish,” she said.
“Hold on tightly,” I instructed as she pulled on the wishbone, and it snapped. Our eyes met, and in that moment, I let go.