Meditation on parenting teenaged girls
Perhaps you don’t have time for this ramble. Perhaps you’ll think, as I think, that I’ve been repeating myself lately, and that I should really move on to something more substantial, newsy, and hard-hitting. Enough with the navel-gazing bursts of nostalgia.
Or perhaps instead you’ll indulge me, and agree to keep me company in my loneliness, as I sit here deceived by the passage of time — a fact of life as avoidable as death or taxes, a concept I should have understood, or that I would have at any rate read about and had the chance to observe. The simple notion that years go by, people get old, once-new cabinets get scratched and scuffed and suffer broken hinges, life gets more complicated and babies turn not only into toddlers, but preschoolers, then grade schoolers — everybody knows that. But also, bizarrely, one day and all at once, into not children at all, into nearly full-sized, decent facsimiles of adults. Only, in today’s case, they’re adults — thanks to having come of age while the world was in quarantine — whose window of social possibility was slammed shut just as it was opening, who are therefore facsimiles of adults who have learned to stay away from people. I came of age in the middle of maelstroms of my peers, at summer camp and middle school dances, where the whole point was getting as socially close to each other as possible. I was bad at it, but at least I had ample opportunities to try and try again.
But back to babies. I love babies. I was so great at babies, so well-trained for their arrival. When I became a mother at 34, I’d already been practicing at parenting for 21 years. My first job was as mother’s helper to Colleen and Ray Simo’s three young daughters, owners of The Baker’s Wife bakery, where The Well now is on Main Street in Great Barrington. I had just turned 13. They had one baby, one toddler, and one little kid. I was good with all three. Well, I did spend a lot of time looking for danish and macaroons, but I can assert that no one was injured under my care.
The most exhilarating feeling I recall having as a teenager was not the knowledge of having attracted the attention of the opposite sex — that rarely, if ever, happened, so I have no memory of what it would have felt like — but when a little one, ideally between the ages of 18 months and three years, stood at my feet and held his chubby little arms up to me. Me! He was looking to me for comfort, because I was a good provider. I was rich in affection and silliness, with all sorts of tricks and games up my sleeve. Diapers were no big thing, I knew tantrums were temporary, and that, when in doubt, bake chocolate chip cookies. As an older teen I didn’t mind that my regular 10-year-old charge needed me to lay beside him in order to fall asleep. I loved to be of comfort.
Then I grew up and became a teacher. At first, and then again and again, I misplaced myself at the high school level. Where I really shone, where I was meant to be and inspired real affection, was among 5th and 6th graders. My class of 30 awkward cutie pies in their stiff or wrinkly or half tucked-in, half sticking out blue polo shirts stitched with KAPPA knew if they ever got rowdy, I might turn to the blackboard and carry on a conversation, gesticulating with my right hand, nodding, shaking my head, laughing at some silliness the blackboard had come up with. Other times I might say, “Wait! Whatever you do, do NOT look at the ceiling,” so they’d all be curious about what was going on with the ceiling for a moment or two, long enough for me to rally them back to my cause. (“Ms. Siegel is CRAZY!” the newcomers would say. “She’s ALWAYS doin’ stuff like that,” a veteran would explain.) More often, I’d give up and let them have a dance party.
All this is to say that when my first child came along in 2006, I knew what to do. I used to bring her with me to the coffee shop in town where I might sip my mocha latte as she gamboled along the bench and mangled a muffin. One morning she did this while I chatted with my neighbor, a dad there with his own boy about a year older than mine. We paused in our chatting and he, observing the two of us, me sipping my drink with one hand, holding my cheerful, outgoing towhead up by the other.
“You make it look so easy!” he said.
I did make it look easy. I’d had hundreds of hours of practice. An active baby was nothing I couldn’t handle. Neither was a disappointed 6-year-old, or a rambunctious 11-year-old.
Is it time to return to the subject of teenagers now? I fear it is. As much as I would like to remain in the past, the present is what brought me to the page today, because it’s the present I can’t handle. Those kids in the Bronx, “my kids,” I called them then, are in their thirties. My real kids are not yet, but the two older ones might as well be for all I feel I have to teach them about life, school, hard work, how to be confident and true to yourself, or how to handle love and loss and making new friends.
I said and did all the wrong things when I was their age. I enthused when I should have stayed cool. I followed the girls who wanted nothing to do with me and ignored the ones I might have connected with. I was knowledgeable about things no one else cared about, and ignorant of all the crucial stuff. Now I’m supposed to help my teenagers figure out how to navigate the same impossible path? Me?
Shouldn’t the first rule of parenting, like the first rule of the healing arts, be “do no harm”? Or at least “do your best to minimize the harm you will invariably do”? In this case, I think the most responsible thing for me to do now and for the foreseeable future is to keep doing what I do well — cooking, driving, ordering clothes online — and pray that there is someone far better-equipped than me out there, some mentor or perhaps mentors who have access to good words, a light touch, and a loving gaze, who will be kind enough to share these things with my teens as they make their way through this world.