My Daughter's Friends
Who are they anyway?
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“Yeah, I was hanging out with Linda,” my daughter says.
Okay, I’ll admit it. I lied. I don’t know if my daughter was hanging out with, “Linda.” Maybe it wasn’t “Linda”. Maybe it was Leann, or Lorna, or Lynn. Or maybe it didn’t even start with an L. It doesn’t matter, because I don’t know Lucrezia anyway, nor Luella, nor Carla. None of them have ever been to my house; I have never spoken to their parents. They are all an indistinguishable blur of consonants and vowels arranged into the vague shape of an adolescent human. My daughter knows these adolescent humans by sight and by name. But I don’t.
This is new and disturbing. Not that long ago, I knew all of my daughter’s friends, because she was a small thing with limited self-propulsion. When she met new people, it was mostly because I had taken her somewhere to meet new people. If she got together with friends, it was because I’d set up a playdate via negotiations with those friends’ parents. And those playdates generally occurred in their house or at our house, and that meant there had to be at least some minimal exchange of pleasantries before everyone bustled off to play with Thomas the Tank Engine (early on) or videogames (later.) Simon and Gabriel weren’t necessarily especially interested in talking to me, but they had no choice. I was in the house; they were in the house. They were stuck.
But time passes, and the kids crawl out of their strollers, out of the houses, and onto public transportation. My daughter graduated from the little Waldorf school she’d been at for 8 years, where I’d known all the parents and all the kids. Now she’s at the public arts high school, with 130 people in her class instead of 20.
My daughter’s very socially ept. Even though she’s only been in high school for a couple months, she’s already got multiple overlapping circles of friends. This is great for her, but somewhat bewildering for us. If she had three or four close friends I could keep them all straight, I think. But the number is more like ten or more, and there’s just no way, especially without faces to put to the names.
More, she actively discourages us from putting faces to the names. We sometimes have dinner with her after school at a little restaurant nearby; other kids go there too. You’d think that would be a good time to introduce us to some of her friends. But instead whenever an acquaintance comes in she insists we put bags over our heads so that we won’t embarrass her. Or else she just greets them briefly and hisses at us if we ask for a name. But she’d prefer the first, I’m pretty sure.
We were bound to lose touch with the minutiae of our daughter’s life eventually. My parents know some of my friends, but certainly not all of them. It would be weird if they did. Growing up means getting your own life, which largely means getting your own social circle. If your parents know everyone you know, then your parents are still at the center of your social life, which is not where you want your parents when you’re a freshman in high school. (I told my daughter that the school required parents to attend homecoming with freshman. she looked like someone who had just been informed that she was going to be eaten alive by rabid squirrels, until I told her I was joking.)
So I’m not surprised that I don’t know my daughter’s friends anymore, but the speed of the transformation has been disconcerting. One day, we saw all that was going on, and then the next, we didn’t. Ashleys and Roberts wander by somewhere out there, while we sit at home with bags over our heads, muttering quiet greetings which are largely ignored. We were relevant, once, but no longer. These days most of the people who matter don’t know our names.
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This ran in Splice Today way back when my daughter was in high school. She is now in college and we know even less of what’s going on. But I stumbled on this around father’s day and thought it would be fun to reprint it.