"HOLD ME COSE, LET ME GO"
(back)
Bookstore shelves teem with advice on how to raise teenagers: Uncommon Sense
for Parents of Teenagers, The Seven-Year Stretch, The Romance of Risk, Living
with Your Teenager, The Secret of a Good Life with Your Teenager. I thought
if I just knew more, knew better how to handle Morgan, then she would be reasonable,
and be happy.
I bought half a dozen volumes and sat with them out on the front steps, doing
what I had done all my life when at a loss: reading, thumbing through advice
books.
Between Parent and Child said you're supposed to mirror your children's feelings
back to them. When a kid comes home depressed because he didn't get the babysitting
job he wanted, the father is supposed to say something like, "You must
feel really disappointed."
I cringed, reading this. If I said, "Morgan, I hear that you are angry," she'd say, "Mom, I hear that you've been reading your parenting books again."
But when I tried it, it worked. One Sunday morning, Patrick complained that
Morgan wouldn't let him borrow the black basketball that had come with her
Nike watch.
"You always borrow my clothes and my basketball, and you never appreciate
it," she screamed at him. "I don't want you to borrow anything of
mine again, ever." She grabbed the ball from him and headed for her room.
Instead of saying, "Oh, Morgan, you know you never use the basketball
yourself," as I usually would, I said, "Patrick, Morgan needs to
know that you appreciate it when she lends you her things."
Both kids seemed to hold their breath for a minute. Then Patrick gave his
sister a token shove and went off without the ball, but she smiled at me.
And actually put her dirty plate in the sink.
Encouraged, I went back to my books, going through the advice with a yellow
highlighter while my work piled up next to my computer.
"The more she loves you, the worse the rebellion as she struggles for
independence," said one book. "The more she feels loved, the freer
she'll feel to be obnoxious."
Morgan must have felt loved to death, I thought.
"It is with girls, not with boys, that parents experience the supreme
disruption of adolescence," said a book called Get Out of My Life, But
First Could You Drive Cheryl and Me to the Mall? "Sweet cooperative daughters
turn, often rather suddenly, into hysterical, shrieking monsters."
This, too, was cheerful reading. How could her metamorphosis into a Gorgon-headed
changeling be my fault -- or her fault -- if I could read it in a book?
One book advised me to separate incidents into Her Problem and My Problem.
My problems included keeping her safe, providing for her needs, and making
sure she felt loved even when we couldn't stand her.
One night I knew she had a Spanish test the next day, but she'd been on the
phone for hours. I was snapping pencils at my desk, so I asked her to get
off the phone.
"I don't like to see you on it," I said.
She said, "That's your problem, Mom. Deal with it."
And she hadn't even read the book. I learned that good moms are firm. Good
moms say, "No, you may not take ten minutes out of your homework period
to watch MTV. No, you cannot stay at
school for song girl tryouts even though that's suddenly always been your
dream and tryouts are today only and you hate me, I'm a peeface."
Between Parent and Teenager said never make blanket statements to your kids,
telling them they always do this, or they never do that. I marked the passage
for her dad to read.
"This is typical of you, Jim," I said in a yellow post-it. "You
always do this."
When I wasn't reading books, I was listening to anyone and everyone. "All
you have to teach her, you have already taught her," a woman inthe line
at the bank told me, patting my arm, when I started gabbling to her about
the hell child I had at home. I tried desperately to remember something, anything
that I had taught her, besides an appreciation for red licorice
and all the words to "Last Kiss."
All the advice I was getting was good. The trouble was that the person --
me -- who was trying to take in all the advice was a harried, nervous, shivering
wreck. Morgan was the tornado, and I was the trailer park in her path.
One morning I barged into her room as she was getting ready for school. The
day before, she had hung up on me and come in fifteen minutes late. Wanting
to take the advice of the book and not wanting another unpleasant evening,
I said nothing. We all had Bill's baked chicken together, and I let her spend
two hours on the phone even though I knew she had algebra homework.
I was fine. She was fine. Until the next morning.
"You left your wet towels on the floor in my room when you were in there
swiping my black sweater this morning," I snapped, and then caught myself.
"It's hard to remember everything when you're rushing around in the
morning," I said. I tried to go on. But what came out instead was: "And
you didn't get your algebra done last night."
Morgan blinked in surprise. Hurt, she left for school again without saying
good-bye. I heard the door slam.
Books tell you what teenagers are going to do. What they don't tell you is how you will feel. If our home life had been a novel, Morgan would be the man whose feelings had turned cold, and I would be the spurned girlfriend waiting by the phone, the one as much in love as ever. And I was scared.
It was the worst period of my life to calmly and humorously put parenting advice into practice, to laugh when my heart was cracking. I was like a friend I knew with a back injury, who toward the end would lie face-down on her hospital bed, her gown hiked up in back, and scream if the doctor touched her back, even when he did it with a feather. All the time now, I found myself screaming at feathers.
Not having control was an awful feeling. When she talked on the phone for
hours, and I knew she had a math test the next day, I was not enraged because
she was in danger of not knowing any math. I was enraged because she wasn't
minding me, because she was standing in my house and not doing what I wanted
her to do.
Sometimes the books advised me to use humor. "Don't give them the reactions
they're after," they said.
It struck me that my sense of humor had been the first thing to go. Where
was the mom who used to drop on all fours. All of a sudden, parenting had
become deadly serious.
One night she'd been on the phone for two hours, dressed in ragged cutoffs
and a tank top, lying atop her cluttered bed like a shipwrecked passenger
on a raft.
"I did not tell anybody that sophomores could kiss my ass," I heard
her say heatedly. "I do NOT want a hug," she said next. Then: "I
like you as a friend," she said. "I want you to respect my boundaries."
I picked up the extension. "If you don't get off the phone, I'm going
to sing ‘Tie a Yellow
Ribbon ‘ Round the Ole Oak Tree’ into it," I said.
And we did, Bill and I, warbling off key into the phone, "Tie a yellow ribbon ‘ round the old oak tre-e-ee," while the dog barked crazily. Morgan laughed -- and got off the phone.
