Lisa Fogarty
Frozen Spigots
My twelve-year-old wants to do everything in her bedroom these days, but we put our foot down and say, “no meals.”
Crumbs, bugs, we’re your family and you love us, remember?
We compromise on snacks. She snakes by us and up the stairs without saying “hello,” clutching a granola bar. The bar will crumble in her hands, oats forced into hiding in the tall grass of her carpet. The catalyst will be a text message that gets her excited, mad, invigorated — all the feelings and uncontrollable hands.
Her bedroom has become a receptacle for trash and emotions. Wrappers on the floor, along with lip gloss stains, hair ties, and dollar bills. The countless reminders to respect money and her space — it’s yours, it’s ours, it’s sacred — yes, both the money and the space. The tears that her rug collects and keeps secret. The pretty purple walls (Benjamin Moore1 “Charmed Violet”) turning their nose up at the ugly beige carpet we meant to replace when she was six and cried over things we could change.
Sometimes she sobs loudly in her room and her smoke-signal sadness finds me. I fear this cry the least because I speak its language. It says: mom, I need you. But don’t come in because I don’t want to need you.
I knock first, but I’m always wrong.
“Do you want to talk?”
She does.
She doesn’t.
Even when she wants me, she hates that she wants me. Maybe adults tolerate pain better because we can turn on spigots of joy in between the sad times to sustain us.
One spigot turn is the smell of the ocean.
Another is a really good kiss.
But twelve is a long winter and their spigots have frozen.
The times she lets me in she is six again, folding her body in half and submitting it into my arms. Her body now is as solid as mine, and almost as tall. She leaves my pajama top damp with tears and mucus. When she’s ready, she reveals all: the friends who said thoughtless things, the schoolwork that makes her feel small, the way her thigh flesh fans out when she sits on a chair. The torture of not knowing what shapes your body will settle on — or who will stay and who will choose to leave you.
In the morning, she runs to the bus stop protected by a forcefield of vanilla body spray. One heel out of a sneaker. And I survey her bedroom for clues that will make all of the crying stop. But there are only math notes on the desk, lollipop wrappers, unlit fairy lights around her window. Her fortress/fantasy bedroom revealing its age in daylight.
Lisa Fogarty is a writer and editor from New York. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Psychology Today, and Change Seven Magazine. She has two beautiful children, three surfboards, and a stubborn Labradoodle named Blake.