When I had my first baby, we were invited to a wedding just a few weeks after she was born. No cell in my being was ready to leave her with anyone. I didn’t know it consciously, but I suppose I became one of those attachment parenting types. I had always wanted children, and when my husband and I wanted to have a baby together, it didn’t quite happen on our timeline. We had waited a long time and experienced a lot of challenges before the title of parents was bestowed upon us. When that moment finally came, we were ready. There was no difficult transition into parenting. I was in love instantly and found being a new mother a wondrous time. I was grateful to have the opportunity to stay home, and when I was itching to get back to work, I created opportunities that included her being by my side.
That wedding when she was a few weeks old could have been an opportunity for a date alone with my husband, but we were both so new at parenting that we spent the whole time out concerned about her. My husband’s cousin watched her while we were out. She had five of her own children, so she was overqualified for caring for our newborn, but still, we worried. We called her too many times to check in. We asked if she was okay, and did she need us to come back. When we arrived back after the wedding and reunited with our baby, I felt such huge relief. We were together again.
I have been one of those overly involved moms. I took her to mommy and me classes. I volunteered at my daughter’s preschool and later elementary school to come in once a week to teach yoga. We attended lots of family events and activities together. I became the PTA president of her elementary school. I advocated for language lessons, an International festival, and a new fundraising event, and added some friendly competition as well as a new sense of community. My daughter was always happy to see me at her school. She always ran up to hug me if she could and didn’t seem to mind having her mom around. She seemed to appreciate it.
Happily, the most important role I have had in my life is being a mother. Being a mother takes the top spot for how I identify myself. I am proud of how I parent, and I feel very connected to my children. I wouldn’t say I am a helicopter parent or a controlling parent, but I would say that I am aware of what my children are doing, and how they are doing, and I am available to them. As elementary school ended and middle school began, I stepped back from volunteering at school. It was time for my daughter to have her own space. My husband and I did start going out on dates again. I started working more, and in the summer, our daughter even went to summer camp for a week on her own.
Walking into my house, it is hard to miss family photos all over the walls, in albums, and even a pillow version of one of my favorite holiday pictures of my two kiddos bundled into hats, scarves, and sweaters. I remember where each photo was taken, the outfits that have since come and gone, and even the way their red, round cheeks felt to kiss back then, when they were a little fuller. I knew that these little kids would grow into big kids, then teens, and one day grow up into adulthood. I have heard a million times or more how time flies and to enjoy the moment, and I thought I understood. Now I see those photos of my little children, and I never imagined I would have to mourn the loss of them being small. I didn’t know how much I would miss their five fingers curled around my thumb or washing their downy hair for them, or the high-pitched voices they grew out of.
We have been lucky that my daughter and I have gotten to spend a lot of time together. We have always been close as a family, and she and I have special things we love to do together. We love seeing theatre, and movies, visiting animals, snuggling our dog, skiing, taking new adventures, traveling, going out to brunch, and trying new lattes together. We have been close, and she has always been open with me in sharing everything from friend drama, sharing who she likes, how she is doing with school, and the goals she has for the future. She is sixteen now, and this school year has been the most challenging yet. She is more stressed than I have ever seen her. She is busier than she has ever been. She is working harder than she has ever worked. She has also experienced the reality of disappointment. As much as we want to believe that if we teach our children to go for their dreams, their dreams will come true, the truth is that it is not always the case. She has reached up and out for some big things this year, and some of them slipped from her grasp. This is important to learn in life, and I am grateful to be able to be here to hold her through her pain and let go when she is ready to try again, and yet I know we won’t always be in the same place in the future. We will likely not be in the same house, the same city, or the same state.
A friend told me that her sister used the password of a date for some of her logins. The date was the month that her daughter would leave for college because she couldn’t wait for her to go. She told me that it is not uncommon for mothers and daughters to start pulling away from each other a year or two leading up to college. It is a subconscious protection measure in preparation for the separation that is coming. I hear things like this, and my reaction in my mind is feeling sad for these people. I think that could never be me, or that it's too bad she can’t enjoy these last few months with her child. Well, here I am, a few months late, and I understand this more than I want to. This is not a choice I have made to have friction between my sweet girl and me; it’s just there, and she isn’t feeling as sweet these days.
There is this polarizing pushing and pulling that I feel is happening to the two of us right now. She needs me less than she did, she wants to need me less than she does, and doesn’t like it when I still need to parent her. She wants to believe she knows what is best for her; she doesn’t want my opinions, but comes running to me to help her before things fall apart. She wants to be independent but doesn’t want to do her own laundry, make her own food, or get her own transportation. She is moody, and I know I am not supposed to take it personally, but I still do. She wakes up and gets ready for school, and is so full of angst that she can barely talk to me. She gets home from school with so much on her plate that she doesn’t have a minute to talk to me. She sits at dinner, and if she is preoccupied, she will barely answer our questions with one word. At times, I feel the need to increase the speed at which I am talking to her because the window of time she has the capacity to talk to me is so limited.
There are days when I confront her on some of this, and she has no idea that she has done anything to upset me. She doesn’t understand that if I get snubbed every time I reach out, it doesn’t make me want to extend my hand so much. She doesn’t understand that some days I resent her, or that some days I drop her off at school and want to cry. She doesn’t understand that I miss my little girl and am having some serious growing pains trying to get through this transition while she grows up. I do want her to understand that she cannot be rude or disrespectful. She needs to understand when to show gratitude and that she is not just entitled to all we provide. She needs to understand that she has new responsibilities that come with getting older and how to manage them in her day-to-day life. She does not need to understand that she is hurting my feelings, that I am having trouble letting her go, or that I am jealous of the hours she spends talking to her friends. Those are part of the whole package of parenting. Like it or not, I am going over this bump in the road.
She is a budding filmmaker and last year made a short called “Still My Little Girl”. It was a beautiful, bittersweet story about the relationship between a mother and daughter when the girl was nine and then again when she was a teenager. She showed that at nine, the mother was the apple of her daughter’s eye, and as a teenager, she could barely look her in the eye. She did not play the teenager, and I did not play the mother. This story wasn’t ours, but she seemed to be foreshadowing what was coming up the pike for us a year and a half later.
Every bit of what she is experiencing right now is normal. Junior year school stress, social navigating, deciding big future decisions, budgeting her time, managing what is on her plate now, while trying to prepare for what is ahead. It is a scary time, and I understand. I want her to know I understand. I will have a day or two where I can’t say anything right, and then a day like today where she asks me for a hug and neither of us wants to be the first to let go. I know that as far as teenage drama and angst, I have a wonderful kid, and it could be so much worse, but I also miss the amount of time she could spare for me. I need to lower my expectations and gratefully settle for the time we do have together. I do wish, though, that she could humor me when I check in and inquire how she is doing with more than one-word answers. I’d settle for two.
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