I had lost Ton Luyk. Were we, in a less extreme way, losing others in our beach time?

It was another winter on the island, a particularly frosty one and our daughter, Lily, a book editor then, had come down to visit. I removed all evidence of my work from the back room and it belonged briefly to her again. When I first was searching Amelia Island, Lily had kept me from making two major real estate mistakes.

She rejected the big enthusiastically-decorated apartments in the buildings next door. She would not let us live in the Amelia Island Plantation, which was full of dining and sports clubs where strangers might get to know each other and had a restaurant called PLAE: People Laughing and Eating. She did not want to inherit any apartment with a raised bathtub in the master bedroom to stare at the ocean when wet.

She understood the island right away and liked the way our place had stayed clean and stark unlike our encrusted New York apartment, pre-war in so many ways, which she compared to Miss Haversham’s and which her friends found to be a perfect translation of J.D. Salinger’s Glass family via Woody Allen.

Our daughter, in her twenties, was full of judgments these days. There had been a metamorphosis in her behavior towards us. She now felt perfectly free to criticize her parents with a mixture of affection and scorn. My mother’s harsh all-seeing eye—more accurate than any doctor’s scale, more fashion-aware than Visionaire—had been passed down the generations and gathered strength.

Here, in this place where she had not grown up, Lily felt free to judge our clothes, our friends, our manuscripts, our beach occupations, our idleness.

She stood over me in the little open kitchen—taller, much stronger, and a much better cook. Somehow, with a mother who had never cooked, I, who entered the kitchen late in life, had bred a truly great cook. She was a young woman who entertained hordes of her literary friends with frequency, skill, and relaxed ease.

As I threw handfuls of things into pots, she was meticulous and measured. As I tore, she shaved transparent Japanese slivers. Everything had a wonderful taste.

Often during this visit I could feel her young eyes boring into my old back.

“Are those jeggings?” she said. It was hard for my daughter to keep the disapproval from her voice. It was a new voice, the voice of the Grown Child.

I was indeed wearing jeggings, gray leggings made to look like jeans, tight to the thigh with zippers at the ankles and, though it was of no concern to the sixteen-year-olds for whom jeggings were created, a nicely elastic top.

I knew just when this new competence, this fresh bossiness had overtaken Lily. We had a life-changing incident on a previous trip back to the city. It was one of those Com Air trips where we, laden down, carrying the increasingly heavy Kukla on and off the small bus that took us from the plane to the terminal, hoisting and panting up stairs at La Guardia to join the very long airport taxi line, arrived in a state. There was no wine in the house only vodka which I cannot drink, but did.

Lily came from Brooklyn that evening and, though she is a beautiful girl, a true natural beauty, she did not look well.

I contained myself, that vein of mother evil, that eye that wants the child only at her best, but Lily had the ability (also inherited) to read my first unmasked glance. Even though I kept my eyes fixed somewhere above her hairline, and my expression, dangerously loosened by vodka, neutral, she knew I was not happy.

“You are a mess,” I said. Finally.

So Lily slugged me. I was lifted up and knocked to the carpet where for the first time I understood “seeing stars.” I woke up with Edward standing over me, shouting at me— how could I have said what I said. He had, as usual, supported her. And there was my beautiful child hurt and angry, also shouting, a whole new suddenly terrifying person. And there was I, a tiny oldish woman on the patterned carpet. No one was helping me up.

That had been the turning point. After a week, we apologized and reconciled but the power had shifted. A part of me would always be on my ass on the carpet.

Here or there, Lily does not want us to be old. She does not want us to get old. She does not want us to weaken or drift away. I was 37 when she was born. Edward was 43. She does not want to see any diminishment, and she had never dealt with sickness or a family death. Maybe that is the first time she saw me as weaker.

Things could only improve and they did, as we have come to like as well as love each other. Sometimes she even asks our advice. Sometimes (rarely) Edward takes my side.

So here we were at the stove. As she stood over my charred pots, I saw the confidence I had seen when she strode onto the stage for the Virgil Academy at Trinity School. Latin professors had come from various desirable colleges and universities and Lily performed brilliantly as I knew by the crestfallen expressions of the other Trinity mothers.

She cooked and cooked. I helped a bit.

“I miss you, Mom,” she said, and I think she meant it.

When she left the island, I searched all over for my jeggings but they had disappeared.