Last Monday, Eleni was your typical third-grader, bounding off to school with a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich and homework folders in her backpack. But by the weekend, a subtle change had come over her, causing me to wonder what happened. Let me explain.
Several months ago, Eleni and her friends became enamored of the TV movie High School Musical. All of a sudden, our house was filled with the strains of “We’re All in This Together” blaring from Eleni’s CD player day and night. My eight-year-old daughter memorized the words to this signature tune and could shake her hips with the best of them. Finally, last week, Eleni asked — no,begged — me to buy her Tiger Beat, so she could read up on her favorite stars. Before long, she’d carefully cut out enough photographs to transform her bedroom door into a High School Musical shrine.
On one hand, Eleni is still very much a little girl. She loves her stuffed animals, holds my hand when we walk down the street, and still tries to jump into my arms as if she were a toddler. But, when I walk past Eleni’s bedroom door these days, teenagers (not princesses) stare back at me, and, in the corner of my mind, I can envision the day when Eleni turns into one of them. For a single parent (or any parent), this is frightening!
For one thing, I’m afraid that my relationship with my daughter — my best friend and ally — might change. Back when Eleni was two or three, and in the height of her “No, Mommy!” phase, I could pick her up and give her a short time-out if she threw a monstrous tantrum. But now that she is eight, and growing taller, stronger, and smarter by the day, I can see that it won’t be so easy to quell a rebellion in five or six years. It’s not as if I’ll be able to say, “Wait until your father gets home!” if she gets on my last frayed nerve. And I won’t be able to defer her questions, about her birth family or why she was relinquished, to another loving adult. I will be the one to bear it all.
Eleni and I have always talked openly about her adoption and how the two of us came together. At each stage, Eleni has accepted the information and mulled it over; weeks or months may pass until she asks, sometimes tentatively, “Mommy, if you had two babies, would you keep me or the other one?” or, “You’ll always love me, right, Mommy? Even if I’m bad?”
It’s hard to imagine what Eleni is digging for when she asks these poignant questions, or what she’ll ponder when she hits the teen years. But as I look at that bedroom door, plastered with bright-eyed teens, I get a funny, rose-colored view of the future. When the kids in High School Musical have a problem with a parent or their friends, they sing and dance away their woes. And when they search for their identity, they sing and dance some more. I know Eleni’s teen years may be emotionally more complex, but that doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes wish life could be so simple.
Illustration by Audrey Robinson
