What’s the Difference Between Heartache and Heartbreak?

I took a long bus ride today, from nearly one end of Manhattan to another. It was a beautiful day, the nicest so far this Spring. I like buses. I prefer them to subways. Especially if I’m not in a hurry, which I honestly wasn’t.

I’d gone with my daughter to lunch at a Vietnamese place she chose, followed by a surprise stop at a puppy place nearby. Not a mill, but a place that gets delicious pups from verified breeders. It’s in fact the place from which my daughter got her amazing dachshund puppy.

After lunch, we walked over to the holiday pop up she’d gotten us tickets for. It was crowded, but not too crowded, and there wasn’t too much to peruse, so it wasn’t overwhelming. Which I think was good for both of us. My daughter’s anxiety has been a bit more challenging for her lately, and therefore for me as well. She had a few moments throughout our day together that were a bit tough. But on the bus ride home, it was something she’d said over lunch that had me mired in a sadness I’ve managed to avoid sinking into in recent months.

She said that she wished we had more to talk about. I agreed. Conversation between us is a struggle. My immediate reaction is that it’s because she can be so insistent on defining and leading a conversation that I often feel I don’t have a way in. Or out. Or through. But on the long bus ride home, I landed on another explanation, one that I think coexists with my immediate reaction, but is even truer to how I’ve been feeling lately. And that is that maybe we struggle to have the kind of fluid chats that other moms and daughters can have because I have so little to contribute to the conversation.

I was saying something along these lines recently to my husband, that I am back to feeling rather rudderless, directionless, kind of pointless, even. I have one project I’ve been managing for us, but that will be done in about a month. I don’t go to an outside job any longer, nor am I actively volunteering as I once was. I have tried to do more on the home front, e.g., cooking, cleaning, handling other things that might otherwise land in my husband’s lap. I’m not in school and don’t have hobbies to speak of. I am embarrassed to say that I was two weeks away with my daughter and got one phone call from a friend. I tried to brush that off, but when I found myself having dinner one night in the den, by myself, with the TV on, I realized that I could easily be that person who keels over and isn’t found until a neighbor complains to the super about a weird smell. What saves me from that fate, at least for now, is being part of a nuclear family, with other people who have needs to which I can try to respond.

Thinking again about my daughter’s comment, I realized that because of my lack of the typical sources of conversational fodder — work, hobbies, friendships, new learning — I have almost nothing to work with. It’s not that I’m stupid; it’s more that I’m dull. I know I’m intelligent, but I’m nearly without motivation. Nothing interests me enough to go after it — not a class, a skill I’d like to develop, nothing. Add to that my increasing inability to hold onto words and thoughts, and I lose conversational threads all too easily. My daughter talks a lot, so I struggle to keep up with which friends she’s talking about in any given moment, and which class or program or other thing she’s involved with. The information she shares washes over and through me, leaving nary a trace. I feel bad about that, but honestly, I don’t even think she notices. That’s another challenge in our relationship, one among many.

I was on the subway the other day with my husband, watching a grandmother listening intently and lovingly to her very chatty granddaughter. She seemed to be talking about lots of things: Passover, a bat mitzvah (perhaps her own?). Her grandmother chimed in now and again, but mostly paid rapt attention to her granddaughter, leaning in toward her and basking in the child’s enthusiasm and rapid-fire idea-sharing. Watching them, I felt something inside me crack.

I never had anything like that with my own mother; never knew my father’s mother, who was murdered during the Holocaust; and barely knew my mother’s mother, who died when I was maybe two years old. And I couldn’t remember when, if ever, I’d had that kind of loving, engaged exchange with my own daughter. One of the photos I cherished, of the two of us going down an alpine slide together, from when she was probably three or four, captured us in a moment of pure joy. You could hear the “Wheeeee!!!” jumping out of the frame. I felt such gratitude and happiness looking at that photo, which sat proudly on a shelf in my bedroom. Until my daughter threw it away, about a year ago, in a fit of rage at me for what, I cannot remember now. That marks another cracked spot in my heart, where some of that precious memory happiness seeped out.

I would so love for someone to look at me and my daughter with the envy with which I observed that grandmother and her granddaughter. Not because I want anyone to feel the sadness I feel, but selfishly because I want to feel the joy that radiated from those two subway riders. I want to be a mother to a daughter that other people look at and think: If they can do it, maybe we can too.

I don’t know how to fill in the cracks. I don’t know how to heal the ache. I desperately hope the condition is not terminal, but what medicine can I turn to, other than to try failing better to love my daughter the way she needs to be loved? And to let the hurts along the way wash off me, allowing the cracks and crevices to mend, so that whoever I am and whatever I do, however inconsequentially, I might actually be worth talking to. And have enough to talk about, somehow, that awkward silence, and strained attempts to connect, become distant memories, unworthy of space on a shelf, or even in a back closet. And that my daughter and I find in one another and in the stories we share, a rich tapestry that gets woven into a quilt of many memories, the kind we can look back on together and muse, laugh, and yes, even cry about. As we chit chat our way through the day…