Baby Love, Part 2

My Girl: Adventures with a Teen in Training
by Karen Stabiner

(Page 2 of 3)

ADOLESCENCE IS THE OLYMPICS of separation events; everything so far has been but a training program for the big developmental break, and I do not feel prepared. To my left, the worn road to embittered, the place where those mothers live who always wonder why you don't call more often, even when you call more often. To my right, the mysterious road to someplace better, for which the American Automobile Association has not yet published TripTiks. The rosebush mom was half right: Children do grow up and go away, and the pace in our household is about to pick up. I understand that big changes are coming. It is the pitched-battle part of her narrative that leaves me cold.

Sarah's childhood was such easy bliss, as I looked over my shoulder at its departing form. It was codependence at its finest. I was omnipotent and wise, she was needful and charming, and there was relatively little back talk. Daily life was full of the smallest of firsts - that bottom tooth, a scrupulously peeled inaugural apple wedge, the ringlet I had in a drawer someplace, an early Sarah written with a backward r-that were no less remarkable for being duplicated in billions of other households in the known universe.

It is hard to let go. Not chronic-depression hard. More like a squall: It hits and it passes. If I do a good job of being the mother of an adolescent, I guarantee myself only a temporarily broken heart. If I do a bad job, it could be much worse. I frankly haven't given much thought yet to what constitutes a good job in the next phase, but this business about her being mad at me someday got my attention.

I should be grateful for the early alert. Sarah is ten, a new tween - which, by the way, is what we called ourselves a lifetime ago, even though some millennial advertising type swears he invented the label and discovered the target audience. She is on the road to being a teenager. I have three years to get my act together.

IN NEWSROOM PARLANCE, If it bleeds, it leads. That is why the story about the teenage sniper runs at the opening of the newscast and the story about the altruistic students who tutor children with learning disabilities comes way after weather and sports. Stories about kids in between, the normal, run-of-the-mill ones, never run at all. We eat anguish for breakfast, and adolescent girls provide a lot of the fodder.

The public consensus is that they are a collective pain in the neck. They weigh far too little or far too much, they steal the car keys and the credit card, they lie through their orthodontured teeth about where they went and with whom, they hate themselves and their parents and the girls above or below them in the pecking order, and they think that oral sex is merely a southern-hemisphere version of a good-night kiss. They dress like tramps. They drink and smoke and spill booze and ash on the shoes they forgot to mention they were going to borrow. Their poor parents usually express helpless bewilderment, like folks who just watched a tornado take the roof off the house and hurl the pickup truck into the bedroom wall. Why, only yesterday, they say, my daughter looked like that sweet little cherub in the photo on the piano.

A causal link would at least provide a little comfort. A mom who fed her daughter junk food and never got her to school on time could speculate about the great girl she might have raised if only she had done a better job. Unfortunately, the commutative property does not seem to hold for child rearing: Stable girls have wretched moms, and troubled girls have pleasant moms, which means that even the best of intentions could lead straight to catastrophe. Sarah may find ample reason to be angry at me as she gets older, whether I give her what I consider to be cause or not.

THE BOOKEND TO PUBERTY is menopause, which we have long believed would turn even Betty Crocker into Lady Macbeth, just as adolescence turns our lovely daughters into harridans. How scary is it? My internist began to lay the groundwork for hormone replacement therapy years in advance, making veiled comments at my annual physical about how much easier the aging process was for his patients on hormones, as though they stormed the of- fice wild-eyed, wielding daggers, if they forgot to fill their prescriptions.

"Easier for whom?" I asked him once, and he chuckled and hit my knee with that little hammer.

He was wrong, as it turned out. Our worldview came from women who went to the doctor to complain about their menopausal symptoms, which was kind of like asking an agoraphobe how she liked the Grand Canyon. Nobody bothered to track down the women who were too busy enjoying life to drop by the doctor's office. When researchers finally did think to ask them, about twothirds of menopausal women had no idea what the fuss was all about.

There it is. For a long time we thought that all women suffered, but we were wrong. Most of us lived outside the fray. What if most girls did, too? It might be that the girls who regarded hating their mothers as a team sport, and the girls with the kinds of problems that spawned headlines, were a vocal minority. Extrapolating from them to the population at large could set us up for calamities that will never happen.

What a glimmer of relief, just to consider the possibility. I imagined us happy when sixteen-year-old Sarah drove off in the car, and happy still when she returned. Happy through the process; unwilling to hate each other just for the sake of her growing up.

We would have to fight once in a while. As I recall, half the joy of shoes with decent heels was winning the battle with a mom who honestly believed that a nice pair of flats would not make you the target of instant ridicule. In my youth, everyone had to have at least one boyfriend her parents did not like and had to insist that any curfew was, by definition, an hour too early, just as any hemline was an inch too long. But those were episodic spats; anyone who has been married for more than a day knows her way around that kind of argument. What I wanted to avoid were the lingering, festering resentments.

That may not sound like much of a goal, but my family crest is anxiety rampant on a field of endless criticism. It would not be easy for me to get through the coming years without resorting to the dark parental arts - nagging, second-guessing, and the inducement of guilt.

MY FRIEND ANNETTE says it is possible. Annette has tremendous credibility because she is as unlike me as anyone of the same species and sex can be - tall, big boned, an observant Catholic possessed of a genuine faith, a serene presence - and since I am prone to self-doubt, I often embrace the voice of the admired Other as gospel. She and her husband have two exemplary sons, and I have sought her advice since the days when having a child was merely a topic for debate.

Some of what she did will not translate. I cannot support Sarah by making the predawn commute to swim practice, like Annette did with her older boy, because being a swim champ in our family means not drowning. I cannot befriend members of the religious bureaucracy, because I was force-fed piety as a child. I am not without skills of my own, though-I can bake desserts that make people want to invite us for dinner as long as I'll bring one, I know every Motown lyric worth remembering, and I can make up stories on the fly.

Does that make me a good enough mother to relinquish a daughter? "We raise them to go away from us," Annette once said, as though it were as simple a matter as making sure they had enough clean socks, "and if we do a good job, we make it easier for them when the time comes."

I was in awe. Unfortunately, I forgot to ask her how.

MY FRIEND CAROLYN says it is possible, too, having raised two daughters who not only love her but seek out her company. She did nothing as a parent that I care to emulate, as far as I can tell from her stories. If there was a rule in the parent handbook that she did not break, she cannot recall what it was. She is in no position to pontificate about child rearing, except that she survived two bouts of adolescence without any lasting scars.

She was appropriately cryptic when I asked her for advice. "Rewrite the script," she said.

I was not intimidated. There may be no more arrogant hybrid than the baby-boomer journalist; there's the sense of entitlement that comes from being part of the largest population blip of the last hundred years, along with an urge to scour the earth for answers despite compelling evidence that they do not exist. In my lifetime, we have changed our attitudes about participation in foreign wars as well as about the benefits of whole milk, virgin brides, and foundation garments. I have witnessed a paradigm shift since I was Sarah's age. I am flexible and curious. Surely this qualifies me to survive her adolescence.

THE CAB HAS ARRIVED to take me to the airport, and the cabbie, wondering why a woman whose suitcase and coat are already in his car is still inside her house, has come to the door to see if I intend to join him anytime soon. Sarah, barely awake, squints at him with displaced resentment.

I sit down and she plops onto my lap. Sarah has always smelled to me like hot sand and driftwood, a wonderful dry smell that has nothing to do with people, and I have been known, over the years, to go back into her room to kiss her forehead long after she has fallen asleep, trying, in part, to memorize that scent. She smells that way right now. It has to go away someday, but it is not gone yet, she is not angry at me yet, and who knows if both those things will still be true when I get home.

I put my arms around her and start to sob. The cabbie retreats to flip the meter. We don't have to leave the curb at all, as long as I'm paying. Like I said, it hits and it passes.

WHEN I GET TO MANHATTAN, I walk up to Central Park for a quick review of the carriage horses that have pulled the evening shift. I call home before I go to bed and tell Sarah about the good-looking white horse third from the front of the line. She tells me all about school and what Larry cooked for dinner. She hands the phone to him on the condition that she can talk to me again, and finally we run out of information to exchange. It is past her bedtime, and she has promised to get up early to walk the dog with Larry.

"Sweetheart, it's time to go to sleep," I say. "I'll talk to you tomorrow." There is a sleepy silence.

"You could just put the phone on the bed and we could both go to sleep," she says. "Then we'd both be there in the morning."

"Sarah, it's really time for bed. You'll be tired tomorrow." "Don't hang up, Mommy," she replies. I don't, not right away.

© 2005 BY Karen Stabiner

About the Author

Karen Stabiner is one of the most respected journalists writing today about health, women's and family issues. She is a frequent contributor on these topics to such major publications as Vogue, O, Redbook, The New Yorker, Los Angeles Magazine, The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times. She has also written about food for Travel & Leisure, Gourmet and Saveur.