I became aware this week that in
six months I will no longer be the mother of teenagers. I confess to indulging in a brief happy dance
at this thought. The teenage years are
no picnic for any parent. On the other
hand, it is a bittersweet passage. There
is something oddly comforting in teenage angst.
Though my heart bleeds for the pain of their youthful awakening, the fact
that my kids still need me anchors my world.
I am reluctant to let go; yet I find that as they loosen their grips the
effect is the same. And though this is
done by degrees over many years, that final release will feel as sudden and
shocking as if it occurred all at once.
I remember with amazing freshness
the first time my son admonished me for saying “I love you” audibly as he went
off with his friends. The look in his
eyes was a combination of horror and mortification. Later, he confronted me, asking me if I would
stop making this embarrassing declaration.
“It’s not that I don’t love you back,” he explained. “Just please don’t say that in front of my
friends ever again.” Then he suggested
that when he goes off with the boys he would touch his finger to his nose. “That way, mom,” he offered, “you’ll know that
I’m thinking about loving you even though I don’t say it aloud.”
This is a sharp contrast to the
tender moments with my daughter. At
about the same age, I simply became irrelevant to her. This was conveyed by a roll of the eyes and
the tender words, “Yeah, right.”
I love my children to distraction,
and I love them equally. But this is not
to say that they are the same in any way.
They could not be more different in humor or temperament. From the earliest moments after birth they
were like night and day. My son was
independent, arching his back if I held him too tightly in my arms. My daughter, by contrast, was born to “coze”—she
was perfectly happy to be my own living baby doll. As teenagers, these differences played out
predictably. My son was anxious to buy
his own clothes, to drive a car, and to live independently. My daughter resisted growing up. I literally had to force her to get her
driver’s license. Although she is
wonderfully accomplished, she is also very close with her mother. Our similarities—not just physically, but
also across a wide range of proclivities—are almost frightening. We sometimes joke that we are a single brain
in two bodies.
This is why the rite of passage
affected me differently with my two kids.
My son managed his own emotional growth smoothly. When it was time to go off to college, I
accompanied him on the long trip to the West Coast. Because of the vast distance, I planned to
stay around for a few days as a safety net.
On the first day, we unpacked all of his things. I hung up his clothes and made his bed. He then looked at me, gave me a hug in
thanks, and said, “Bye, mom.” With no
apparent usefulness, I showed up at my mother-in-law’s house. Playing a funny sort of latter day “odd
couple,” she and I palled around for the rest of my stay as I waited in vain for
a desperate call from my son.
With my daughter, however, the
teenage journey affected me more personally.
Her brand of independence seemed to come at my expense. It was less a matter of proving her
self-sufficiency as it was proving to herself that she was not me. I
found it difficult to acquiesce to her need for space when it was accompanied
by disrespectful verbal jabs. I could
yield to the first, but not to the second.
It made for a tough few years, but she always found a way to let me know
that she was still the same person deep inside.
There was one particular moment before my father’s funeral when she
squeezed my hand and held it tightly, communicating to me in that moment that
she got me like no one else.
I am not alone among mothers who
are continually baffled by teenage daughter behavior. It was explained to me that we tend to treat
our children like dogs. We say “don’t do
this” and “don’t do that” until we are blue in the face, (tempting us, no doubt,
to wish we could swat them on the nose with with a rolled up newspaper). Then we are shocked when they act out
defiantly under our noses—the behavioral equivalent of pooping on the
carpet. The problem is that daughters
are not dogs, they are cats. Our
admonitions fall on deaf (or is it indifferent?) ears. We are no more able to train our daughters
how to act than we are to teach a Siamese to stay off the sofa.
My daughter’s college fencing
coach, a former Olympian and Hall-of-Famer who has coached an exclusively women’s
team for 36 years, explains it this way.
She said you must think of a teenage daughter’s brain as teeth. As they are growing up, their brain is like
baby teeth. Then, sometime during high
school, just like deciduous baby teeth, their brain falls out. For an unpredictable period of time, your
daughter is walking around with no brain at all; this is reflected in all
manner of irresponsible and defiant behavior.
Then one day, her adult brain begins to grow in. With that, she begins to assume the
characteristics of the adult she will become.
I am happy to report that I am
beginning to see signs of adult brain in both of my kids. I just hope that when all is said and done, I’m
not as lame to them as I was during their teenage years. Yeah, right!
Tomorrow's blog: Post-Dramatic Stress
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