Parenthood: The Teen Years

I have just finished reading a beautifully written and very provocative essay about raising teenagers (“The Mother of All Problems:  On Raising Teenagers,” by Rachel Cusk) which was published in the New York Times and it made me think about how my family is managing on our daughter’s journey through those difficult years.

The subhead of Ms. Cusk’s article is “Children are characters in the family story we tell – until, one day, they start telling it themselves” and that subhead is remarkably telling and insightful.  Our daughter’s journey to independence is underway and she’s keenly interested in starting to develop her own narrative and mythology.   It begins with the experiences, dreams and feelings (including those about my husband and me) she shares with her closest friends and I can only imagine how colorful and ripe they are. I know that before long they will bloom and become her own exciting, personal "story" and expression of how she thinks about her world and the place she desires in it -- for good and, occasionally, for ill.

The ways I know she’s truly a teenager?

1.      She keeps things close to the vest with her father and me – I frequently have to pry information out of her, but it comes at a cost (grumpiness for hours).  David, who has a gentler way with her, uses his lawyerly skill (more Atticus Finch than Johnnie Cochran) to greater effect and learns a heckuva lot more than I do.

2.      She spends a lot of her time behind closed doors.  When I knock to enter, I am sometimes not invited in. 

3.      She expects me to do everything (wash clothes, make meals, serve her, pick up after her, clean, etc.) and then complains about it (boring recipes, dirty clothes and nothing to wear, etc.).

4.      There’s usually girl drama in her life of one kind or another.  It takes a lot of emotional energy to whip up the content for endless hours of talk with girlfriends.

5.      Boys like my daughter in their very passive-aggressive, 14-year old way.  We’ve had our trees tee-peed, our door bell rung with “no one” at the door…you get the picture.   The cat and mouse of boy-girl stuff is beginning.

6.      My girl is dying to get the party started – because it looks like fun, with cute guys and girls dancing, scheming, and dancing when they aren’t kissing or singing in a rock band.  I blame Teen Nick and Disney Channel for this.

7.      Hello, Miss Independent: She wants it, and I am willing to consider it. One day.  It’s a big world out there, and my helicopter mom instincts scream “danger ahead.” My bad.

8.      Who is sullen, moody, and argumentative?  Enough said.  I’ve learned to live with the necessary evils of puberty, pimples and all they engender emotionally.

9.      When I pick her up from a friend’s house or school, she wants me to stay in the car, Mom!  I embarrass her.  And that embarrasses me.

But then, there are those divine, loving cues that remind me there’s still a little girl inside the teenager – notice it’s a shorter list:

1.      Curling up in her father’s lap in the family room easy chair on a Sunday morning.

2.      Thanking me for making her breakfast or dinner.

3.      Hugging me when I wake her on a weekday morning, grumpy about having to go to school but grateful for the reassuring affection.

4.      Those quiet moments, alone in her room, when I can look through the opening in her doorway and see her sitting on her bed, playing with the hair on her American Girl doll, lost in her thoughts.

My daughter is only 14 and the toughest years lie ahead.  At some point the growing pains may become hard to bear and even terrifying on occasion.  And while my experience of my daughter’s transit to adulthood doesn’t map completely to the one so vividly portrayed in Ms. Cusk’s thoughtful essay, I think it’s fair to say that we both find the experience of navigating the shoals of our daughters’ later adolescence to be challenging, unsettling but thrilling at the same time.

I'm just so glad that I get to experience the journey with her.

 

 

 

Fifty Shades of Cinderella...and Cookie

I thought I'd offer up some musings that probably reveal a lot about my Baby Boomer demo:  I passed up the opportunity to (belatedly) see Fifty Shades of Gray to attend an opening day showing of Cinderella.  That’s right.  Sixty-two and a Disney Princess Forever.

While it’s true I was bored anytime Cate Blanchett’s wicked stepmother wasn’t on-screen – which was far too often – I still got a kick out of a beloved tale told with some style.  Visually, the movie was stunning:  Vivid blues and golds, silvers and pinks and for Stepmom, chartreuse.  Helena Bonham Carter, a true English eccentric and always a fun actress to watch, was a kick as the Fairy Godmother.  The young actress who played Cinderella was utterly charming – blonde (of course), beautiful (natch) but very winning (not too sweet, not too sour).  Only the Prince was a disappointment, but that’s not an uncommon occurrence when it comes to princes, so it didn’t bother me.  I generally loved it.

At some point, I’ll see Fifty Shades (probably on DVR with my husband, so we can giggle together) but I can wait.  I slogged through the books and have a pretty good idea of how things go down in the Red Room (smile).

But then there’s Empire and crazy, angry, utterly lovable in her own unscrupulous way Cookie Lyon, and her ex-husband, the sexy, surly, seriously bad Lucious Lyon, Rap Mogul Extraordinaire played by Terrence Howard.  The 2-hour finale was as bonkers and over the top as I’d hoped for, down to Terrence Howard’s final line as he stares at the camera through the bars of his jail cell:  “Game time, bitches!”

I guess you can tell that I haven’t been doing much reading lately.

On that note, I’ve gotta go, bitches.  Game time at the office.

 

 

 

The Blahs

Every year, I find the month of February to be more annoying and less enjoyable than the year before. This year, I had lots and lots of reasons to want the shortest month to fly by – my husband’s knee replacement surgery, for one thing, the brutal cold for another and the unrelenting stream of snow, ice and rain storms drifting their way across the country to our little piece of heaven in Northern Virginia. 

Let’s start with the surgery.  First, the good news – my husband is on the mend having progressed from a walker to a cane this week, and his surgeon is a genius:  The knee itself looks like something out of Frankenstein, but boy is that incision clean.  Of course, the first week I was panicked by my role as head nurse, keeping track of the administration of serious drugs and putting him on machines to move the knee and ice the knee and generally help him heal.  And then, of course, I was worried about the weather because of my role as carpool mom and provider of all food for  family consumption – when he scheduled the surgery, he told me the weather report for mid-February to late March was relatively benign. 

LIAR, LIAR, PANTS ON FIRE.

Of course I love him, and so I have forgiven him.  But this is the last mid-winter surgery (the 2 foot surgeries 3 years ago were also January and February events!) I will ever put up with again!  Ever!!

Then there’s the weather itself.  Pure misery.  I’ve decided I really hate the cold and, although I used to make fun of it in my youthful thirties, I now understand the whole concept of snowbirds.  I want Gulf Coast Florida in my life and I want it NOW.  Sadly, and along with the whole East Coast, I’ll have to make do with about 5+ inches of snow tonight instead.

Plus it’s tax time…and tuition time…and just about grey outside all the time.

I need some spring in the air and in my step.  I need a beach.  I need a break. I need a bottle of wine and a nice hunk of cheese while sitting at an outside café watching pigeons swoop and poop….

Ok, I’m done now.  Forgive me.  I’ve got the Blahs.