Back in those silent days, I didn’t know how it was going to turn out. It was 2020, the height of COVID. The kids and I were trapped in our rental house, waiting for the Treehouse to be built. Each day we’d be at our stations — spare bedroom desk for Connor, home office for me, and Kendall not bothering to even leave her bed, doing her classes while snuggled under her comforter. The sounds of the day in the Deagle house were muffled voices through pocket doors as we proceeded with the pantomime of school and work.
Every day at 6pm I’d grab my coat and punch the garage door opener, sliding into the passenger seat of Connor’s silver Subaru. Five minutes later, a sullen Kendall would join me, getting behind the wheel.
Driving lessons.
It’s hard to teach someone to drive when even breathing too loudly is frowned upon. When your 15-and-a-half-year-old is doing her best to pretend you don’t exist. But permit-holders can’t drive without a grownup in the car, so the evil of my existence had to be accepted. I gave tips and guidance of course, which was mostly rewarded with a disdainful grunt in response.
Forty hours at the wheel was the state of Virginia’s requirement for moving on from permit to license. A regulation work week. That’s how I framed it in my head: I was going to spend a regulation work week with a colleague not interested in communicating.
Other than driving instructions, accepted with that surly grunt, the only other thing I discussed was the music she played.
“Who sings this song?”
“Is this the same singer as that other song?”
“What does that album cover mean?”
“Is this singer still alive?”
It was the thinnest of threads, learning about the music she listened to. But it was all I had to go on. She didn’t come to me about boy advice, friend drama, homework help, anything else. So I leaned in in the only way I could, showing I cared about what she cared about.
We’d skip by Post Malone, do SZA on repeat, wade through the disjointed vibes of Tyler the Creator. But my favorite, though God forbid I say it out loud, was “Where’d All the Time Go?” by Dr. Dog. Something about the catchy melody, the pauses, the sing-along-ability. I’d hum it under my breath so as not to call attention to my enjoyment.
I knew she liked it too, only because it was one of the few songs she never skipped.
We survived driving lessons. We survived the pandemic. She got her license and no longer needed me in the car.
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Time passed. Calendar years torn off one by one. That fifteen-year-old surly newbie driver is now a twenty-year-old junior in college, taking Europe by storm during her study abroad.
A month ago, I was tucked into my usual Thursday crack-of-dawn spot at Rare Bird Coffee Roasters, listening to the take-no-s**t tattooed barista call out order numbers while snippets of conversation floated around me. My notebook, iPad, banana bread, and flat white threatened to overwhelm my tiny tabletop.
Then the distinctive first bars of a familiar tune filled the air. My perception of the buzzing room began to narrow, the coffee shop receding as a scene from half a decade earlier filled my mind’s eye. I giggled.
Then I opened my messaging app, tapping the grey-circled ‘K’, and punched the voice note button as I began to sing very softly along.
“Where’d All the Time Go… it’s starting to fly...”
I shifted over to a whisper: “Hey, I’m in this coffee shop so I can’t sing too loud, but our song just came on, and I wanted to say I love you!”
I hummed a few more bars and giggled some more. Then hit send.
I tapped the Shazam app to capture the particulars, forwarding the Dr. Dog song title across the ocean to Lisbon. To Kendall.
I followed up with a “So happy we have US!”
I have no idea how it happened. Honestly, I’m not sure I want to know. Some mysteries are better left unsolved.
What I do know is this: at some point between those driving lessons and now, something shifted. The disdainful teenager thawed. The grunts turned into actual responses. That moment in the coffee shop was just one of a hundred in the last few years that has surprised me. Just during my recent trip to visit her in Portugal, we had nonstop, deep, real conversations about life. Not a single side eye or surly grunt. She gave me Instagram lessons, showed me every single one of her thrifting purchases, even endured an overcrowded and opulent bookstore just because she knows what’s important to me.
But it’s how it felt when it was just the two of us, not doing much at all, that shows me how our relationship has evolved.
On our last night in Portugal together, we sat facing each other across a tiny ramen bar around the corner from Kendall’s dorm in Campo Pequeno. The rectangular outline of the LED lights extending above the bar made it feel like a mirror, like I was staring into myself, but seeing my daughter instead.
We slurped in companionable silence, a silence a million times different than those car rides. We were content in each other’s company. Connected without saying a word.
It feels like lifetimes ago that I sat next to her in the Subaru as she conspicuously turned up the music in order to drown out the unforgivable sound of my breathing.
I had no idea how to reconnect with her back then… All I knew was that I loved her, even when she was not so crazy about me. And that was enough for me to want to stay by her silent side. Some days you might have called me resigned, while on others I was accepting. Either way, I wasn’t interested in her music because I was under some delusional impression that knowing the words to SZA would make her want to talk to me again. I just was taking what I could get, without having a clue how it would turn out.
Apparently, that was enough.
Singing along,
Sue
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