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.