Meeting my Daughter

Yesterday started with my daughter telling me to "stop being a Butt."  Like Butts do, I had nagged her to hurry up and get ready to go, which sent her into a hair flinging, backpack swinging, name-calling rage.  "You cannot talk to me that way," I said, feeling powerless and lame and old, something that did not result in her wrapping her arms around me and telling me how much she loves me.

Angry, hurt, wondering where I'd failed as a mother, I'm embarrassed to say I gave her the silent treatment on the way to school and stormed into my office without even telling her I loved her. I'm sure that showed her.

This stage of parenting is something you have to experience to believe.  We've all been snotty adolescents, but loving one with all your heart is like cave diving - unknown, deadly, and terrifying.

I've taught adolescents for more than twenty years.  I know them.  I get them, but my daughter has become a stranger.  Not too long ago I was highly tuned to my daughter's needs.  Tantrum?  "She's hungry," "She's exhausted," or "She's anxious."  Now, tantrums seem to be caused by my presence in the room, the sound of my voice or my loving touch, and it is not predictable.  At 5:15 I'm Mommy, the center of her world.  At 5:19 the sound of my voice makes her want to throw up.

Luckily, I teach in a middle school.  When I left my daughter yesterday morning I moved among hundreds of children her age whose faces light up in delight when they see me, as hers does when she sees her beloved teachers.

At lunch my students gave me a great gift.  I stood on our field in the pouring rain and ripping wind, and children came out like they do to run, and cartwheel and race, and gambol around outside free from paper and grades and the plastic torture-devices that are our blue plastic school chairs.  These two simply wandered, arms linked, raising their faces to the rain and holding onto each other in the buffeting wind.

I wondered if they ever called their mothers "Butt," and then realized it didn't really matter.  Even a child who calls her mother names becomes this child when she's twelve years old and with a good friend.  My daughter was, even as I took this picture, being this child with her friends somewhere in our school.  She was this child to her teachers, adults just like me except that she adores them all the time.  She would be this child with me again.  Children have goodness in them all the time.  For adolescents particularly, it's the setting that determines whether or not it's safe for that goodness to be shared.

After school I took my daughter to a coffee shop she loves near our house.  Though not too long ago I knew her so well I could read her needs and fix them with Cheerios or a cuddle, I felt a little awkward and shy, as if meeting her for the first time.  She talked about things that matter to her and told funny stories about things that happened during her day.  I packed away my "I know you so well" certainty, outdated as knowing how to make a cassette for a friend, and worked hard to listen and learn.  She was funny, and goofy, and raw in that way people with confidence but no polish or self-consciousness are.  I realized I liked this person even more than I liked the baby, toddler, and little girl she once was. This person was new to me.  This person had something to offer I couldn't anticipate and didn't already know.

I'd like to say we talked and then held hands and danced across a meadow afterwards, best friends forever, but the truth is we drank our drinks and left a little respectfully and guardedly, like new neighbors who'd just met in a driveway.

I'm glad she's moved in.