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	teen voices

Twisting With My Teen
By Ann Symonds
Web Exclusive

I, like most mothers of girls, had heard my share of mother-daughter conflict stories, but when my preteen daughter began acting rebellious I wasn't as prepared as I had hoped to be.

The first signs began when my only daughter and middle child turned eleven and faced several important life transitions. For one, she was beginning to develop. Buds were forming on her chest and she had shot up like a rocket in the previous six months. She knew she was turning into a woman, but didn't want to accept it-not just yet. She declined offers of a training bra on the insistence that she didn't need one (she didn't) and that it would itch and be annoying. At the same time, she began locking me out of dressing rooms and refusing to let me see her in undergarments. The second-and more immediately troubling change-was her impending transition to middle school from grade school. Half her class would go to one school, the other half to another. Splitting up friends of six years was traumatic. Old worries surfaced as quickly as new ones emerged and caused her to ignite at the slightest slight.

For instance, her explosion when I called her in at the tail end of the annual Memorial Day neighborhood block party half an hour earlier than I had promised. When I called her in early, she complained. When I called her again and explained that I was doing so because she was soaking wet from the recent downpour and that most of the neighbors had already called it a night, she complained more. When I called her a third time, she blew up in an uncontrolled rage.

But she did come in-albeit, throwing her shoes at the wall and screeching at her loudest pitch. Nervous that I wouldn't be able to calm her down, I threatened to call her father for support. Even though we hadn't lived together for 3 years, he and I had been consistent in disciplining and raising our three kids. Usually a call to him gave her pause. This time, however, she ignored me. "Call him." she scoffed, "He can't do anything anyway. He doesn't live here anymore!"

I was stunned. Never had she challenged me so blatantly. "Daddy made the right decision to divorce you," she continued as she shrieked, trying to push my most vulnerable buttons. My daughter knew how to strike where it hurt. Her father had left me for another woman.

Shaken, but trying to act composed, I marched to the phone and dialed her father. He supported my decision and told her so. Resigned, she stomped off to her room, slammed the door and then threw items, one-by-one, onto the floor. I heard them thudding on the kitchen ceiling below-an incessant drumbeat of her desire to thwart my authority.

This time, time worked in my favor. When I went up to check on her 20 minutes later, she had dissolved into tears and let her feelings spill forth. She was upset, she said, about her father's visible absence at the block party. Her friends had had their dads by their sides all day. And it bothered her that I had been doing the yard work that her dad had done before he moved out. "It's not fair," she raged, "he's not doing his job as a father and husband!"

I held her close and in her release of emotion she wept her apology to me about her earlier strong and hurtful words. I accepted her self-reproach, knowing that her loss of grade school friends was exacerbating the wound of our changed family circumstances. Nevertheless, I was concerned. Could I bear another 5 or more years of turmoil?

Thankfully, her next outburst was more benign: she demanded I buy her a new dress for her fifth grade graduation dinner. It didn't matter, to her, that she had several nice outfits that would be lovely for the occasion. No, the dress had to be new.

Hating to cave in to materialistic, peer pressures, I finally agreed to her demands simply to avoid a prolonged and heated battle. Three shopping trips and four stores later she found an outfit she liked and we were able to cross that crisis off the list.

By then, summer break was upon us and I was exhausted, ready for my daughter to take up temporary residence anywhere other than my home. When a small miracle occurred. My daughter-in a sharp change of mood from the previous four months-reached out to bond with me. This shift began one evening halfway through our week away at the Outer Banks of North Carolina. The day had been dreary with rain and the late clearing of the skies enticed us to wander down to the beach. I intended to take a long walk alone while the kids played in the sand. When I announced my plan to the kids my daughter surprised me. "Can I come with you," she asked, "just me and you?" "Of course," I replied. I was thrilled that she wanted the time alone with me.

Before long we were engaged in one of the more heartfelt conversations we have ever had. She talked about her jealousy of her brothers and her desire to spend more time alone with me. I talked about my divorce from her father and my sadness over the loss of our original family unit. She talked about her feelings about the divorce and her continuing love for her father. And we discussed my desire to eventually meet and bond with a loving man. By the time we returned-after going much farther and longer than we had intended-I felt the warmth flowing between us in striking contrast to the animosity we had felt two months prior. I almost dared to believe this change might continue.

Miraculously, it did. The next day my daughter asked if we could go sea kayaking. Since her brothers didn't want to go, we set out alone on the sound in a two-person boat. Gliding through the water in rhythm with one another, I again felt the peace flow between us. She did too. A few minutes later, she turned back to face me and asked, "Mommy, can we do more things together, just you and me?" "I'd love to," I responded, daring to trust that her changing mood might be more lasting.

And so the shift in attitude continued. A week later my kids and I went on a family reunion with my mother and brother's family. We had reserved two rooms for my family. On previous reunions I had put all three children in one room and kept another for my privacy. But after our week at the Outer Banks, I felt an urge to share my room with my daughter, hoping to tighten the bond we had begun weaving the previous week.

My reaching out paid off. Over the next four days I was with my daughter in ways I hadn't heretofore. We planned our outfits for dinner, helped each other select jewelry and make-up and whispered good nights after turning the light out each evening. Our time together was special and she told me so. We had crossed a bridge that I felt would sustain me when the inevitable tough times resurfaced. I would be able to look back to those moments and know that she would too-realizing that we had the strength to separate from each other in healthy ways without impairing our equal need for closeness.

That realization sustains me now as we have again entered another tough period. Because my daughter knows me so well, she can pummel me with words that would shrink a violet. But her past show of love and care for me helps me put her words in perspective. I know now that she is trying to find her voice and hard as it may be for me, one of the ways she is doing so is by diminishing all that I represent. But I also know that her gentler self lies beneath and when she outgrows her need to define by distance, these days of brutal words will soften to distant memories in a scrapbook of days gone by.