A Small Town On The Water
Maya Stein
My daughter was going to be a gymnast. I hid my giggles as she attempted to do cartwheels in the yard and helped her navigate her little body through a forward roll. She complained that the movements hurt her neck. I told her they would get easier. Every other week, I drove her carpool home from junior gymnastics lessons. Her face lit up whenever I arrived early enough to watch part of the lesson. She never seemed to master any of the moves, but I loved cheering for her attempts.
My daughter was going to be a writer. I helped her fold pieces of paper into booklets and read her bedtime stories every night. Her creativity was both hilarious and inspiring. During grade school conferences, her teacher warned me that she didn’t seem to have many friends. Apparently she spent recesses alone at her desk with pencils and paper. “I’m not worried,” I told her teacher. “She is going to be a writer.”
My daughter was going to be a wife and a mother. She showed me lists of future baby names and photos of her dream wedding dress. After a growth spurt in seventh grade, she discovered she could almost fit into the dress I wore at my wedding. She put it on every day after school. One night, over family dinner, she proclaimed that she was going to have eight kids. My husband remarked that she always did seem to be drawn to the chaos. We wished her the best of luck, suppressing our smiles behind glasses of water and forkfuls of salmon. About a week later, following a twenty minute fight between my three daughters about where everyone was going to sit in the car, she announced that she was going to have five kids. “Everybody needs to be able to fit into the car,” she exclaimed. I smiled at her and sighed.
My daughter was going to be a surgeon. Her bedroom became cluttered with medical dictionaries, first aid kits, and Halloween costume scrubs. The kitchen sink became a scrub-in station. Whoever found themselves unlucky enough to be in the room with her became her scrub nurse. She learned to do sutures on browning bananas and pretended to do appendectomies on stuffed animals. I will never forget the screaming that erupted when she “accidentally” operated on her younger sister’s stuffed bear. The conflict was easily resolved with store-bought stuffing and messy sutures. I surprised her with a doctor-themed fifteenth birthday party and gifted her a pair of customized scrubs.
My daughter was going to graduate from a prestigious college. Maybe she would even work towards a PhD. I helped her complete her college applications. I held her in my arms as she cried through each rejection. I threw a party for the acceptances, then held her as she cried in anticipation of the change.
My daughter was going to live in a small town on the water. Not in Florida or California or anywhere where it was sunny all year. She wanted to live on the east coast and experience all four seasons. She wanted a town that filled with tourists throughout the summer but stayed empty the rest of the year. As we packed her clothes for college into large, black duffels that she once brought to sleepaway camp, she told me how I would visit her future town in the off season. The bookstores and local boutiques would not be crowded then, and she would introduce me to the local merchants. They were going to know each other by name.
My daughter was going to have a high-paying job. We sat in the yard, squinting to see the contents of her laptop screen against the bright light of the sun, searching through potential college courses and majors. She said she wanted to work towards a job that allowed her to occasionally work from home. Her home was going to border the ocean. She knew it was cliche, but she pictured herself in a house with a white picket fence. Sometimes, when she felt like being impractical, she imagined the house as a spotless mansion, filled with precious antiques and rooms that were so vast and clean that they didn’t even look lived in. Every time I stepped away from my daughter’s side as she analyzed the college website, she switched the tabs on her screen and began scrolling through million dollar homes for sale on Zillow. I promised that, if she focused and selected the courses she wanted to register for, she could show me the blueprint for the house of her dreams. I wanted to bring her back into reality, knowing the houses she viewed on Zillow would soon become more depressing than motivating.
My daughter’s home was going to have a two-car garage, but it would always be too cluttered to fit more than one car inside. “My home isn’t going to be huge, but it is going to be comfortable,” she told me. She would plant flowers along the entryway to her house each spring that would die by the time winter rolled around. The house would be beige with brown doors, like the home I raised her in, but the border of the windows and the garage doors would be a bright shade of blue. She couldn’t live in a house lacking a pop of color. She would have a red-brick driveway for the same reason. As someone drove past the road of black, concrete driveways, her house couldn’t help but stand out.
My daughter left home and went to college, taking the first major step to make her dreams a reality. On our weekly calls, she promised she was taking care of herself. She said she was making sure to eat and remembering to take her medications. She survived stressful exams and hard days by talking about her love for the salty smell of the ocean and the sound of the waves. She called me to tell me the itinerary for the future parties and BBQs she would host, which she assured me I would be invited to.
My daughter came home for a particularly chilling winter break. As we dressed our dog in winter attire and tried to get him outside, she detailed the peaceful winters she would experience in her future town. When her small, empty yard was coated with snow, she would find calm just outside her back door. She would sit under the deck’s awning on a rocking chair, surrounded by the adirondack chairs, seeking shelter for the winter, and stay there for hours. A mug of sweetened earl gray tea growing cold at her side, struggling to turn the pages of her book while wearing thick winter gloves. She said I needed to learn to tolerate the cold, as she expected me to read on the deck with her each time I visited. She promised to keep an endless supply of mint tea in her pantry, and to frequent the Little Free Library to ensure I had my choice of paperbacks to read.
Without warning, my daughter’s passion began to fade. I called her, begging her to tell me about the town’s beautiful bookstores. I joined sessions with her and her psychiatrist, helping her navigate new medications and an increased frequency of therapy. She added additional mandatory check-in calls with me to her schedule. As I tried to convince her to get out of her bed and to class, or even just into the sun, I wished she would talk about the dock in the backyard and the flowers that would bloom throughout the spring and summer.
I decided to make an unplanned trip to her dorm. I needed to hear about the small town on the water. I planned to remind her of the failed cartwheels in the yard. Of the short stories she once created and the silly names she planned on using for her future children. Maybe we would laugh about the browned bananas stitched with yarn or the fake prescription bottles filled with jelly beans that she enjoyed at her doctor-themed fifteenth birthday party.
When I arrived at her dorm, my daughter was missing. I cautiously walked to her bed and stood over an empty vessel, once filled with imaginative dreams, then darkness, then nothing at all.
I promised my daughter that I would sit in the front row at her college graduation. I promised that her persistence would become her greatest strength, and told her about the success I knew she would achieve in her career. I promised I would welcome her husband into the family, as long as she was sure he was the one, and that I would spoil her children. I assured my daughter that I never make promises I cannot keep, so she could trust me when I told her I was going to provide everything she needed to bring her hopes to life. Staring into her blank, brown eyes, I felt the weight of these broken promises shattering into pieces around me.
My daughter is never going to live in a small town on the water.
Maya Stein is a Rutgers University student majoring in Psychology and Cognitive Science with a minor in Computer Science. She plans to graduate in 2026. Maya is from Livingston, NJ. She is passionate about spreading education and awareness around mental health, and this story is a result of that passion.
Maya wrote this story in a course taught by Aimee LaBrie, who selected the piece for inclusion in the WHR.