—Her relationship with her mother
My fourth day on the island, Mom emailed me with a subject line of???and no body, save a link to anAtlanticarticle about how teens today spent less time with their friends in person than a decade ago and reported feeling lonelier.
Thanks Mom!!I replied.
Mom couldn’t always read inflection in my emails, but even shewould probably notice the sarcasm wrought by my double exclamation points.
Gmail instantly alerted me to a new message, because Mom apparently thought email and texting were the same.Are you lonely??
In her case, the double punctuation signaled not sarcasm, but earnestness. She worried about me way too much. I called her.
“Hello?”
“I’m not lonely, Mom. I have a job—”
“Wait! I need to fix the ear thing—hold on...”
I rolled my eyes and clicked on a link in the article’s sidebar about climate policies to read while I waited.
“Okay. Hi. Did you like the article?”
“Do you think I’m lonely? I’m not lonely.”
“I know.” Her defensive tone made it clear she was lying. “But it says...”
“Mom. Have you not noticed my million friends?”
“True.” She switched to hopeful. “You have a very good group. But what about on Nantucket? You don’t know anyone!”
“My roommate is nice. I met her friends.”
“Okay. Good. Because, you know, people are pack animals. You need a pack.”
“I’m fine, Mom.”
“You haven’t called me since you arrived.”
Sometimes convincing Mom I was well-adjusted felt like my raison d’être. She occasionally panicked about her parenting skills, as though I was a soufflé in danger of collapsing. I suspected her own parents hadn’t been particularly nurturing, and so Mom felt pretty in the dark about how to behave. (To be fair, O’ma and O’pa’s parenting had probably been influenced by their own childhoods. They’d been a bit more like: Are the children alive, fed, and not inimminent danger from Nazis? Cheers, everything’s going great.)
“I’ve only been here three and a half days,” I reminded Mom. “And Iliterallyjust called you. And texted youevery day.”
“I suppose.” She still sounded woeful. “Should we Zoom?”
We video-chatted for forty-five minutes, my brother Dave wandering in and out, Dad quizzing me about the seashells on Nantucket (I had no satisfactory answers). Mom wanted to know about every person I’d come into contact with in enough detail to map out our relationships on a whiteboard. I was not, I must admit, reticent in complying with her demands.
My parents were cute. Painfully-in-love cute, write-mushy-Valentine’s-Day-cards and forget-other-people-exist cute. They still flirted, about getting married and their first date. Dad joked about how he’d meant to marry rich, and Mom always retortedshe’dmeant to marry rich, and then the two of them wound up smirking and stealing kisses.
It did a number on you, growing up around people madly in love. It made you think their kind of love was not just attainable, but necessary. It made you think your partner should act like you made the tides move.
This was probably not healthy.
When we hung up, I flopped backward on my bed. Sunlight crossed the ceiling, and summer air drifted in from the open window. Sure, I’d been lonely once or twice in the past few days, but you don’t say so to worry-prone moms. So what if sometimes I was lonely? Everyone was lonely. Re: thisAtlanticarticle.
I wished journalists would go back to hating on millennials and leave my generation alone.
I picked up my phone, pulling up my roommate’s number. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Me:
