"HOLD
ME CLOSE, LET ME GO"
Foreword
By Bronwyn Donaghy
(back)
Some teenagers slide through adolescence as smoothly as a hot knife through
butter. Most make a bit of a mess but clean up well when it’s over. Some,
because of their personalities, their past and possibly, but not always, their
parents, turn the whole experience into something quite horrible. And make
it even more so for the people who love them.
Unfortunately, adolescence is now recognized universally, although not necessarily
correctly, as being a horror stretch for parents throughout the western world.
Books and articles telling us what our teenage children are going to do, and
why, are increasingly common. The demand by parents for advice on how to handle
the sassy, sexy, sulky, multi-personality, multi-pierced people who used to
be their sweet and smiling little children, seems insatiable.
But as Adair Lara tells us half way through her anguished search for wisdom
in bringing up her rebellious daughter Morgan, the books don’t tell parents
how they will feel.
In Hold Me Close, Let Me Go, Adair Lara does exactly that.
With the sometimes terrifying honesty of Americans which Australians may find
confronting, Adair Lara explores her own feelings towards the increasing rebelliousness
of her first child and only daughter, sharing with us her anguish, her fear,
her undeniable and sometimes too-consuming love, her mistakes, her small successes,
and with regard to her own adult passions and relationships, her perceived
selfishness and her inevitable crushing guilt.
In Hold Me Close, Let Me Go we follow Morgan’s progress through adolescence,
from drinking beer in a public park at the age of thirteen (‘having a
thirteen-year-old was like having your own personal brick wall’), to
the terrible day three years later when her mother sits in a hospital waiting
room, ticking off in her head the potential teenage problems parents dread
most: ‘cutting class, failing grades, smoking, drinking, early sex, drugs,
running away, stealing, pregnancy,’ and realizes that with the exception
of running away, Morgan has dragged herself and her family through all of
them.
With painful, distressing and frustrating clarity, we share with Morgan’s
family – her mother, her younger brother Patrick, her long-suffering
step father, Bill, and her natural father, Jim, who lives upstairs, their
struggle to find solutions to the problem of living with a manipulative ‘hell
child’ who lies to them as sincerely as she loves them, who breaks all
their rules, refuses to accept responsibility for any of her problems and
creates trouble and hostility throughout her mother’s far-flung but fiercely
loyal tribe of sisters, brothers and family friends.
Every parent who has argued with their teenage son or daughter, listening
to those bland, wide-eyed, ever-so reasonable explanations, or has appealed
to their child to look at any domestic situation through eyes other than their
own, will identify with Adair Lara’s struggle to explain to Morgan why
she doesn’t want her to drink alcohol in parks at night, to cheat in
tests, to truant from classes, to drop out of school, to drive with wild boys
in stolen cars, to have sex with her boyfriend while her parents are (not)sleeping
in the bedroom next door, to take an increasingly dangerous cocktail of illicit
drugs or to be pregnant at sixteen.
Magnificently (because Icouldn’t manage to keep quiet about even this)
Adair manages not to mention the Manic Panic red hair, the astonishing and
revealing attire Morgan chooses to wear and the war zone bedroom mess. Like
life itself, this book is not confined to parent-adolescent conflict. Inevitably,
there is more going on in Adair Lara’s world than the strife with Morgan.
We can’t help but sympathize as she struggles to maintain her marriage
to the floor-mopping Bill, her friendship with Morgan’s father, her relationship
with her other teenager, Patrick, and of course, her professional career.
I have been writing and speaking about adolescent health for many years and
I am now in the final throes of parenting my third teenager. My son has perfected
the art of speaking to me without moving his lips, which means I spend most
of our arguing time shouting: ‘What?’ so that he can walk off with
a disgusted sigh, muttering: ‘Doesn’t matter’, even when it
very desperately does. At the same time, like many of my peers, I am struggling
to come to terms with the fact that just as I am stepping over the threshold
to freedom from parental responsibility, my mother, alone and suffering from
early dementia, is becoming more dependent upon me and my sisters than my
children.
For this reason, I was particularly moved by the added complication to Adair
Lara’s life when her unconventional father walks back into it, after
deserting his wife and seven children many years before.
Here Hold Me Close, Let Me Go takes an exquisite twist, as the old man’s
desire for some sort of forgiveness and acceptance from his daughter in a
strange way reflects what Adair and Morgan - and perhaps the rest of us as
well- are seeking from each other. This intricate weaving of the stories of
father and daughter and mother and child, is what sets this book apart from
the text books and advice manuals.
Ultimately, this is a story about hanging in. Because of her mother’s
determination to keep loving Morgan no matter how badly she behaves (even
though she doesn’t always like her very much), to make sure she finishes
high school, to stand by her daughter in a way her own father was not prepared
to do, Adair Lara ensures that Morgan never becomes the neglected street kid/prostitute
of her nightmares. Morgan survives because her mother keeps talking to her,
never walks away, never gives up.
After reading Hold Me Close, Let Me Go, I was reminded of a conversation with
a woman who was my teenage best friend. Like me, she believed the excitement
and fun of bringing up her own teenagers had outweighed the difficult times.
Like Adair Lara, however, her oldest child had dragged their family through
the whole booze, sex, drugs and dropping-out disaster zone. Furiously angry
with my own eighteen year old at the time, almost wishing I could run away
myself, I sympathized with her. ‘How are we supposed to feel when they
let us down, lie to us, talk to us like that?’ I asked my friend. ‘What
can we do when they behave so horribly?’
She smiled at me gently and said: ‘Love them even more.’
Bronwyn Donaghy, December2001
Author of Anna’s Story –Anna Wood: The Facts, the Fury, the Future,
Leaving Early – Youth Suicide: the Horror, the Heartbreak, the Hope,
Unzipped: Everything Teenagers want to know about love, sex and each other
and Keeping Mum: Secrets of Happy Parenting and Other Lies.
