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	teen voices

'Bye
By Sue Diaz
Web Exclusive

Slumped in the front passenger seat of the minivan, I stare out the window and listlessly track a few confetti-like bits of garlic skin floating off the back of the passing farm truck on the left. Outside, the rural landscape around Gilroy, California, streams by at 65 mph, but I scarcely see it. I am still back on a campus in Palo Alto, saying good-bye to the freshman whose diapers I used to change, whose honey hair I used to brush, whose birthday cupcakes I decorated with whipped cream and sprinkles.

My arms fold around Anne in a hug that is about to end, as farewells always do, too soon. "Thanks, Mom," she sputters into my shoulder. There are no right words at a time like this. Breathing in the herbal scent of her latest conditioner, I search for a golden nugget of truth to leave with her, a profound pearl of some sort. Words my firstborn can hold on to on those days when friends disappoint and term papers are due and Tofu Tortilla Olé! is the only dish left on the cafeteria's steam tables. I want to whisper something wise and real before I let her go, before she walks out of my arms and toward the doors of a building where boxes filled with blue jeans, printer paper, and Lauryn Hill CDs wait to be unpacked.

"I love you, Donut," is the best I can do, my voice catching on the nickname I gave her once upon a time, long ago, in a distant land of lullabies and wind-up swings. She turns to hug her patient dad, plants a smooch on his whiskered cheek. "Bye, you guys," she says softly, reaching for the handlebars of the mountain bike that leans against the van. She looks both ways, waits for a car with suitcases tied to its top to glide by, then strides with her bike toward her new home across the street. Just before she disappears, she turns, smiles a crooked smile, and waves as if her hand is underwater.

I'm looking at my 18-year-old daughter, but I'm seeing a gathering crowd of little girls I used to know: one with a dangling front tooth she "inthists" isn't ready to be pulled; another standing on a grade-school stage in a sparkly pink tutu, curls bobbing with every wobbly plié. I see a five year old in a flowered nightgown, settled on the living room couch, reading The Cat in the Hat to her three-year-old brother. Here comes a skinny third grader in a Brownie uniform, toting Thin Mints through the neighborhood, or pretending she's a teacher named Ms. Crumb with a class of stuffed animals completely clueless when it comes to long division. I see a shy ten-year-old bowing at her first piano recital after a galloping rendition of "The Wild Horseman"; a middle-schooler wearing a bra she won't need for at least a few more years; a high school senior, poring over college catalogues in the fall, pinning a single rose to the lapel of her prom date in the spring. I can hear those girls, too--chatting, laughing, sometimes whining, often singing along with the Little Mermaid or the Backstreet Boys, bursting into the kitchen to tell me what's new, who likes who, and why Friday night's curfew is totally unreasonable. Here on Highway 101, I begin to realize just how much I'll miss them all.

I look over at my husband, his hands on the steering wheel, eyes on the road. Anne has his grandmother's elegant cheekbones, his intractable curls, and a pale birthmark, just like his, in a place precious few will ever see. He glances in my direction, reaches over, pats my knee. We've both known for 18 years that this day would come. Then why do I feel so unprepared? Sure, sending one's children off to make their way in the world is what parenting is ultimately all about. There comes a time when separation is inevitable, healthy, an all-around good thing at this particular stage in all our lives.

Hey, come on now, I tell myself, eyes brimming, she's still your daughter. She's just away at school! But a phone call isn't the same as seeing your child's sleepy face at the breakfast table every morning, and e-mail can't take the place of shopping together for the right shade of eye shadow.

Off to the right, between the highway and the unseen Pacific, a mountain range, solid as the Great Wall, rises up from deep-green fields. It's late afternoon, and the marine layer is moving in. Today the coming cloud cover isn't simply blowing past the top edge of the range. It's crawling down the mountain's eastern face, moving like lava between the lines of the pines. The effect is eerie, almost magical. The mountain is still there, underneath it all, immutable as ever. But the landscape is undeniably different now, transformed by the ocean's misty breath into a Chinese brush painting.

I can't help feeling that there's a message here, mixed up with the fog and the trees. Something about the lovely new possibilities inherent in the flow of change. Something, too, about finding strength in the bedrock of "before."

Sue Diaz is an advertising copywriter and an award-winning humor columnist for San Diego Family Magazine. A collection of her essays, The Snake in the Spin Cycle: And Other Tales of Family Life, is available on Amazon.com. Sue lives in San Diego with her husband and two college-age kids (when they're home on break).