“Forget acting. I’m going to be an eco-saboteur.”

She turns fifteen this month. These are the first words out of her mouth when Grammie brings her back to the cafe from wilderness survival summer camp. I think I’m holding my own at the espresso bar in her absense, but she gives me a light hip check, grabs a pitcher off the top of Roxanne (our espresso machine), and starts steaming milk. I stand back and look up at her.

She towers over me in every way. She’s all arms and legs, and cornsilk hair that falls nearly to her waist. She pulls a shot and tamps it with passion on the counter.

“How was camp?” I ask.

“A-MAZ-ING,” she reports. “But I’m SICK of what people think they can do to the environment.” Her tirade pauses just long enough to carefully stream the milk into a cup so that it pours out in the shape of a heart. Gently, she sets it on a saucer, then slides it across the counter to a customer with a demure smile. “I just don’t wanna be here,” she hisses more to herself. But I hear those words.

“We’ve got this today,” I tell her. “Why don’t you go on out back to the stream and just hang out?”

I can feel her sadness and confusion bounce around in my ribcage. A good week at camp means a tough re-entry. She works until closing, then disappears. It doesn’t matter how wonderful this cafe is. It isn’t a forest. It isn’t a stream. And it isn’t her friends.

Her friends. That, I soon learn, was the most spectacular part of camp this year. It’s a small program, with only a few kids each week. Each year she’s gone, longing for the opportunity to be with other girls. Some years there has been one, maybe two other girls at most. There have been times Saoirse has been the only female. This year, she got a cabin-full: six girls started the week, and a whopping four of them managed to see it through. They were like Cedar Wax Wings in the forest, flocking together, making contact calls, bonding stronger and stronger as they moved through the wilderness, practicing the art of disappearing into the landscape, and listening, wrapt, to the tales of Tom Brown, to stories about the exploits of eco-saboteurs in the 1970s and 80s, fighting for mother earth with cleverness and bravery.

Bob and I try to listen, raising our eyebrows to the legends of heroics. This is the age for these fantasies, we agree. They’re cool. We’ve even entertained our own fantasies. But they’re just that. Fantasies. Later that evening on the screen porch, she tells the story of some kids thirty years ago who poured sand into the gas tank of a bulldozer on a development site. Bob leans forward, brow furrowed. “You realize that it wasn’t the people doing the development that suffered for that, right? It was the guy who owned a bulldozer who was just out on a job. What if someone did that to Larry’s (our contractor and neighbor) stuff, just because he was out working someplace?”

“I know, I know, Dad,” she laughs it off. “But these guys never even got caught!”

I try to change the subject. “What would you like to do for your birthday?”

“Nothing.” The feisty girl from the espresso bar is back. “I don’t want anything.” With that, she slips out the door, back into the woods.

She sounds way too much like her own mother.

But that doesn’t resolve my confusion.

Nine months ago, she just wanted to be a barista. Six months ago, she was passionate about becoming a chef. For the past few months she’s been memorizing the lyrics to Hamilton and Chicago and talking about studying theater. Today, the trappings of civilization are offensive, and eco-sabotage is the only honorable way forward.

I just want to get through her 15th birthday.

Sunday evening after the cafe closes, Ula comes to find me, locking me in the bathroom so she can have my undivided attention.

“It’s Saoirse!” Her eyes are wide with alarm. “In the cafe, after you left, she was slamming things around saying ‘I just don’t want to be here.’ So we finished up and came home and she said it again, ‘I just don’t want to be here.’ And Mama, I think it’s ME. She doesn’t want to be with me!”

I squat down in front of my 11 -year-old. “She loves you,” I assure her. “But I think your sister has a case of the fifteens. And we just have to let her go through it.”

But I don’t manage to do that. On Monday we go down to the cafe to work on the equipment before the girls are up. They decide to hike the five miles down on their own, practicing the art of vanishing into the wilderness whenever a car comes along on the road. I’m glad for them, taking those hours to restore their balance and friendship. Saoirse’s eyes are joyous when she gets to the cafe and hops up onto a stool at the espresso bar. Bob and I are starting to clean up when I ask the question once more:
“Have you given any more thought to your birthday? Grammie and Pop Pop want to know.”
“I told you. I don’t need anything. I don’t want to do anything.”
“Fine.” I slam a coffee puck out of the grouphead and begin wiping the counter with furor.
“What?” Her eyes are wide and innocent now.
“If you don’t want to do anything for your birthday, that’s fine. But you’ve had a chip on your shoulder since you came back, and I gotta tell ya. I’m not sure how everyone else feels, but it makes me feel like shit.”

In that second, my little girl, the one who loves her mother above all else, is back in the room. “No! No! Mom! I’m glad to be back! I’m really glad! — I just don’t feel right asking for anything!”

What I did wasn’t fair. It was manipulative. I can’t make her like this life. I can’t guilt her into embracing her family. Bob jumps to her defense. “She wasn’t being snappy,” he says, loading boxes onto the supply shelf. I mumble an apology, and we move forward with our day.

I vow to listen harder, judge less.

She disappears into a book for the afternoon, and our family rhythm returns. For supper, Ula goes to her friend’s house, and I fry some pork chops and make salt potatoes and ratatouille. It is just the three of us. I call her down as I put the plates on the table. She doesn’t appear right away. Bob comes and sits, and still she doesn’t appear. I’m waiting. Is this dinner to be rejected, too? Is there to be a sullen lament about our mundane domesticity?

I hear her footsteps on the stairs, but I don’t turn around, bracing for more conflict. Moments later, she appears at the table and I look up.

She’s wearing a flowing puple rennaissance gown, complete with a golden crown. She stands tall at the table and looks down at Bob and me. “I’ve decided what I want for my birthday,” she announces. “I want to go to a Rennaissance Faire.”

Barista. Chef. Actress. Eco-warrior. Rennaissance princess.

I lean back and take a deep breath. She knows I’m not a big fan of crowded gatherings.

“And I want you to come this time, Mom! ‘Cuz you’re gonna LOVE it!”

The Rennaissance Faire is near her Uncle Sean and Aunt Lyndsey’s house in Massachusetts. “I’ll make plans after dinner,” I tell her.

She wiggles in her chair with the excitement.

The next day, we turn off the phones, fill the packs and head out with the girls for a day hike. By lunchtime we are sitting at the base of a waterfall, laughing, listening to more camp stories and exploits. There are no chips and edges now. Just laughter and joy. In the quiet spaces between tales, I stare at the water as it tumbles over the rocks, thinking about this child who is rapidly becoming a woman. And in my mind, I am the rock, and she is the water cycle. She tumbles over me one moment as a rushing stream. She transpires into the air above me, then falls upon me as a pelting rain. And my job is to stay the rock, steady, always letting her flow over me, letting her come back to me in every form she may adopt. I find myself staring intently at the ridges and grooves of the slick surfaces behind the falling water. The rock stays still, it would seem, for all time. But it doesn’t. It is shaped, every day, by the actions of the water.

We disappear for hours that day, talking, walking, scrambling, gazing, playing. Repeatedly, Ula and Saoirse thank us for this beautiful day, but it is them who should be thanked. I am loving their stories of the world beyond ours. At dusk, we slip back into the car. I reach my hands back behind me as I’ve done for fifteen years, reaching for my daughter’s fingers, as I have since she was in a car seat, when I would wrap her tiny fingers in my own, letting her know that, even if she didn’t see me, I was there. And two sets of fingers, now longer and stronger than my own, intertwine with mine. And I hold onto them, cherishing the strength, the callouses, and the moment, drinking in every second I can have with them.

Happy birthday, Baby Girl.  I love you.