Lauca and I have not been seeing eye to eye of late. I don’t know what kind of smugness I was suffering from when I once imagined that we weren’t going to be the type of mother and daughter to fight when she is a teenager. We so are.
But one afternoon last week all the arguments and defiance and impatience fell away and it was so good. You know how close you feel to someone when you laugh together? And on this afternoon we laughed so hard together.
And gawd we needed it.
By the way Lauca wants to be a vet when she grows up. I hope we are getting along then, we could do with a vet in the family.
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And you know, it’s *really* not just mothers and daughters who fall into the petty power struggles, impatience, backtalk, and all the little sooty marks on our daily lives. I have this with my older son (I’ve got two boys), and it took something like seven years to realize it’s because he’s like me, who’s like my dad, who’s like my son. Oy.
When we’re in the trenches like that, it’s awfully good that we love each other.
All my children are very precious and loved, but I do really treasure my daughters. It used to be common for women to say that the mother-son relationship was especially close, but my reaction was that we should be loyal to each other as females, and to value ourselves as females. My second daughter and I had lots of fights during her late teens and as I was emerging from the trauma of divorce, but somehow we emerged from that able to tackle difficult issues when we encountered them and to resolve them, and despite the considerable disparity in our abilities and interests we are very close.
If you don’t have trouble getting along when she’s a teenager, if she doesn’t figure out the best ways to push all your buttons, then there is something wrong.
Incidentally, all the women I know whose mothers were most obsessed with the idea that they would not or should not fight with their daughters, that they and their daughters would bond over mutual interests, are the ones who moved a very long way away from home as soon as possible. Not all the friends who moved away had mothers like that, but all the friends with mothers like that moved.
Oh, I know what you mean! I always think my relationship with my son is like any kind of passionate relationship – in that sometimes we’re really in sync with each other and love each other’s company and I feel a deep connection with him that goes beyond words. It’s like being ‘in love’. And then there are times when everything we do gets on each other’s nerves, times when we are alien to each other, and lots of times in between. It never ceases to amaze me, even though it makes perfect sense.
I reckon everyone fights with their teenagers. Surely. Rite of passage.