It started by accident. At the suggestion of a friend, I sent my 15-year-old Belle and Sebastian the song “If You’re Feeling Sinister.”
“Cool song,” she texted back. “I like it.” There were only five words, but it was the most that she communicated to me carefully in months.
Over the last few years, my once-living daughter had become sullen, anger and resentment rolling up around her. Several factors seem to be contributing to this. Covid-19 certainly played a large part in her darkness, her graduation from high school, her prom, and the busy social life that fed her extroverted personality. But her friends had also suffered losses, and I knew no one who had stopped in their rooms and stopped talking to their parents. Somehow I became the enemy, and nothing seems to bridge the growing chasm between us.
For many years we were a team. A single mom, I had lied to her, and she was to me, more than usual in a mom-daughter relationship. But all that has changed.
“I’m trying to understand you,” I told her one day, being careful not to make eye contact.
“I just do not want you to know me anymore,” she replied. “I do not even know myself!”
She was right, of course. How could I know her if she did not know herself? It became clear to me that our unusual proximity was actually part of the problem. She had to break away from me, but how could she do that while I was trying to stop her? We need a new way to connect.
A few hours after her text, during which I could hear Belle and Sebastian’s song on a loop, she left her room and sat down for the first time in weeks with her sister and me for lunch. I tried to engage her, asking some tentative questions: How was her science project started, where was her best friend at camp this summer? It soon became clear that I had flown it. She stormed back into her room and slammed the door behind her.
As a psychologist, I communicate in words — I feel from my depths communicating through music. So I named my friend Shannon Lorraine, a former musician in the Seattle band Witholders.
“Try this,” she said, “on the plane across the sea,” from the Neutral Milk Hotel. But not too excited when she expresses interest. Played a cool. “
I sent my daughter the song and suppressed my urge to follow up with a text. This time, she left her room for a few hours. I called Shannon and told her, “I feel like you’re a snake charmer. Tell me what to do next.”
She recommended further songs, and slowly the cloud around us dissolved a bit. But words were still hard to come by.
Finally, Shannon went out of his way to make recommendations. For a while, I took over Spotify and it offered songs by bands I had never heard of: The Postal Service, Françoise Hardy, Beirut. But when I wanted a relationship with my daughter, I realized I could not rely on an algorithm, so I started making my own suggestions: Stevie Wonder, The Beatles, Joni Mitchell, The Cure, and a favorite from my childhood – Malvina Reynolds. These were small excerpts from my past, from me that I was hoping to connect in ways that words apparently could not.
