On mothering teenagers

I have a teenager and a near-teenager and I’m going to say something really loud so it’s really clear: Parenting a teenager is the hardest, loneliest, most emotionally trying phase I’ve ever experienced as a mother, and by far puts the biggest strain on my marriage, and our family as a whole.

There. I said it.

And it’s LONELY. Did I mention that? Because there seems to be an expectation or idea that the kid is “already raised,” that they’re “done.” That since they can bathe and dress and feed themselves, parenting them isn’t as difficult as caring for a newborn.

Of course this isn’t Parenting Struggle Olympics, but I have to say, in my experience, newborns don’t have shit on teenagers. Okay, they may literally have shit, and newborns are physicallymore exhausting, but when it comes to emotional and mental toil, teenagers have proven significantly more trying than those tiny bundles of squishy milk breath.

And here’s why: Setting aside postpartum depression and anxiety, newborns are relatively simple. They’re difficult, but overall, kind of simple. They need clothing, holding, feeding, changing, bathing. It’s an incredible amount of work, but it’s a clean difficulty, a straightforward work, and if we surrender, and stop trying to control the little monsters every waking moment to FIT INTO OUR EXCEL SPREADSHEET OF BABY, we settle into a little groove.

And oh, they offer so much in return, and so immediately: Smiles, coos, new developments every damn week. Baby breath. Chubby thighs. Their little bottoms in the air when they sleep.Omg I want another baby.

And babies, well, they tend to not go for the jugular.

I can’t recall a single time my infant said a thing that touched my deepest insecurity as a parent, a personality trait I’m ashamed of, a real flaw I have that is suddenly being held against me by a human whose cell phone bill I pay for.

From “Why aren’t we talking about parenting teenagers. I’m lost AF” by renegademama. God, I really, really appreciated finding this post. I have been feeling so lonely as a mother of a teenager and have been trying to finish writing a piece about all this stuff for a while now… but, man, it is hard.

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An interesting way to approach the dilemma of mother writing when kids get older

“Raising a teenage daughter” by Elizabeth Weil with comments and corrections by her daughter, Hannah W Duane in The California Sunday Magazine.

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The overcriminalization of personal behaviour

This is the most disturbing case I have ever read about sexting, and about the vulnerability of young people when police powers combine dangerously with the increasing power of technology.

“A teen sexting case revealed how judges let police invade children’s privacy” by Jay Schweikert in NBC News. 

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What price believing?

“Students who are told that things are fair implode pretty quickly in middle school as self-doubt hits them,” he said, “and they begin to blame themselves for problems they can’t control.”

Barrett’s personal observation is validated by a newly published study in the peer-reviewed journal Child Development that finds traditionally marginalized youth who grew up believing in the American ideal that hard work and perseverance naturally lead to success show a decline in self-esteem and an increase in risky behaviors during their middle-school years. The research is considered the first evidence linking preteens’ emotional and behavioral outcomes to their belief in meritocracy, the widely held assertion that individual merit is always rewarded.

“If you’re in an advantaged position in society, believing the system is fair and that everyone could just get ahead if they just tried hard enough doesn’t create any conflict for you … [you] can feel good about how [you] made it,” said Erin Godfrey, the study’s lead author and an assistant professor of applied psychology at New York University’s Steinhardt School. But for those marginalized by the system—economically, racially, and ethnically—believing the system is fair puts them in conflict with themselves and can have negative consequences.

“If the system is fair, why am I seeing that everybody who has brown skin is in this kind of job? You’re having to think about that … like you’re not as good, or your social group isn’t as good,” Godfrey said. “That’s the piece … that I was trying to really get at [by studying] these kids.”

From “Why the myth of meritocracy hurts kids of color” by Melinda D. Anderson in The Atlantic. 

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you can’t say what you feel because they might read this

Letting Go

– Fay Zwicky

Tell the truth of experience

they say they also

say you must let

go learn to let go

let your children

go

and they go

and you stay

letting them go

because you are obedient and

respect everyone’s freedom

to go and you stay

and you want to tell the truth

because you are yours truly

its obedient servant

but you can’t because

you’re feeling what you’re not

supposed to feel you have

let them go and go and

you can’t say what you feel

because they might read

this poem and feel guilty

and some post-modern hack

will back them up

and make you feel guilty

and stop feeling which is

post-modern and what

you’re meant to feel

so you don’t write a poem

you line up words in prose

inside a journal trapped

like a scorpion in a locked

drawer to be opened by

your children let go

after lived life and all the time

a great wave bursting

howls and rears and

you have to let go

or you’re gone you’re

gone gasping you

let go

till the next wave

towers crumbles

shreds you to lace—

When you wake

your spine is twisted

like a sea-bird

inspecting the sky,

stripped by lightning.

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Want best bang for buck in policy in terms of re-election as well as improvements in well-being for your population?

Spend it on mental health, according to this very interesting policy research. In terms of government expenditure, it is both super cheap and leads to super impressive outcomes.

What gives you best future outcomes? Spending money on the mental health of mothers and schooling systems that focus on the emotional health of children (especially in high school).

(And I suspect some of the income inequality effects in this research are crowded out by work intensification lifestyle effects).

 

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Lovely blogging on marriage and being apart

Even airports are more relaxed on Sunday mornings. The place is full, but no one is running across from the carpark or pushing their way to the front of the queue.

‘Wish I was getting on a plane and going to Spain,’ I say.

‘Well,’ the mister says, ‘Come through Abu Dhabi on the way and we can go to Spain.’

‘Oh, no, I want to go alone.’

He laughs. It is a proper laugh and I wonder how he does it. How he loves a person who is so often absent, who so often retreats. It seems never to injure his love for me, never to bruise his heart.

Anyway, it isn’t true. I don’t want to go to Spain. The thought of that takes me by surprise, although the truth of it does not. It is time for me to be still. That’s why I’m here, isn’t it? That’s why I’ve moved back to Adelaide. To bury my roots in something more than sand.

From writer, Tracy Crisp in “Sunday” on her blog, naive psychologist.

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You can’t be a girl when you’re a girl’s mother

This is really interesting! From “What does it mean when we call women girls?” by Robin Wasserman in Literary Hub.

Here’s how Louis CK draws the distinction between girl and woman:

[22-year old girls] might say, I’m 22, I’m totally a woman… Not to me, sorry. To me you’re not a woman until you’ve had a couple of kids and your life is in the toilet… when you become a woman is when people come out of your vagina and step on your dreams.

If it’s easy to see how the girl label attaches to unmoored millennials, it’s less evident how it applies to women firmly rooted in the adult phase of life. But it makes sense if we read the “girl” narratives as corrective to the Louis CK threshold, the “girls” as women who refuse to let a little thing like people coming out of their vaginas ruin their dreams.

All the Single Ladies, journalist Rebecca Traister’s recent take on the rise of the single woman, opens with her childhood conviction that the marriage plot was less fairy tale than Shakespearean tragedy. “It was supposed to be romantic, but it felt bleak,” she writes of the nuptial trajectories of her girlhood literary heroes. “Paths that were once wide and dotted with naughty friends and conspiratorial sisters and malevolent cousins, with scrapes and adventures and hopes and passions, had narrowed and now seemed to lead only to the tending of dull husbands and the rearing of insipid children to whom the stories would be turned over.”

The girl books crowding the nonfiction shelf are written by and about women who insist on sticking to that wide path, women who refuse to Jo March themselves into a supporting role in their own life: girlhood as a state of mind.

The word attaches itself with special frequency to women in music and the sciences—not as diminishment of their achievement, but as its trophy. Girl in a Band, Lab Girl, Hunger Makes me a Modern Girl, Rise of the Rocket Girls: these are women who followed their girlhood passions into male-dominated fields and triumphed. Their stories speak of subverting gender expectations, breaking barriers, and—at least on the page—prioritizing work and art over the role of domestic caretaker.

In Girl in a Band, Kim Gordon pauses—briefly—in her tale of Sonic Youth’s rise to acknowledge the birth of her daughter: “Yes, she changed our lives, and no one is more important to me. But the band played on.” Gordon spent the first half of her career answering journalists’ inevitable question about what it was like to be a girl in a band; the moment she gave birth, they instead wanted to know: “What’s it like to be a rock-and-roll mom?” Her daughter might well be the most important thing in her life, but she’s nearly irrelevant to this story, which is about music, ambition, and the need to create. Gordon writes about her difficulties expressing her true self, relieved only by art: “For me the page, the gallery, and the stage became the only places my emotions could be expressed….Art, and the practice of making art, was the only space that was mine alone.”

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This whole thing is incredible writing…

your auntie & ‘nem done finished the wine & put on that Ohio Players or whatever album makes them feel blackest. they dancin’ nasty & you watching from the steps when you should be sleep. your uncle is usually a man of much shoulders & silence but tonight he is a brown slur in the light, his body liquid & drunk with good sound. you feel like you shouldn’t be looking at how shameless he moves his hips, how he holds your auntie like a cliff or something that just might save him. your mama is not your mama tonight – she is 19 again, unsure what burns in her middle. your not-mama is caught in a rapture so ungospel you wonder if this is what they mean by sin, & if it is, how, like really how, could this be the way to hell? you’ve never seen her this free, this on fire this — “BOY!” she screams at you but not so you’ll go back to bed. she calls you to her, you grab her hands, she shows you where you come from.

From “Notes For a Film on Black Joy” by Danez Smith in Gawker.

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On teen mothers

When Julian was born, my euphoria intensified. To this day, I still can’t articulate how deeply and fiercely I love my son without shedding a few tears. He was this perfect, amazing little thing. But because I was a nineteen-year-old new mum, there was a sharp polarity between how I thought I should feel and how I actually felt. Stigma said that my life was over; I knew something significant had just begun. Society demanded sacrifice and selflessness but parenting my son never felt passive or transactional; it was always more rich and complex than giving something up in exchange for something else.

From my friend, Antonia Hayes’ “Why I loved being a teenage mum” in Marie Claire.

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