Debunking assumptions about adolescence

We are told that girls have a hard time with adolescence; that mothers and daughters quickly become adversaries and that all-out war is inevitable. But watching her daughter Sarah enter the teenage years and their relationship change, Karen Stabiner came to reject the notion that this time had to be miserable. In fact, she found something quite different — that most moms and daughters actually got along. Karen Stabiner was invited on the “Today show to talk about her new book “My Girl: Adventures with a Teen in Training.” Here’s an excerpt:

Baby Love
Children get younger right before they go to bed. Sarah is ten, all angles and bones, but when she is drowsy, wrapped in her flannel cocoon, she is six, maybe seven, flushed peach cheeks, soft curls, and a hazy grin. Back then she had light bones; I could hoist her in the air long after other kids her age were earthbound. Now I wonder how long it will be before I cannot carry her.

She says that if I pick her up every day I will always be able to, which makes sense so long as I do not dwell on it. I pick her up about once a week, but not the way I once did, scooping her up one armed, swinging her onto my shoulders, spinning her until I felt the centrifugal force tug at her wrists. I was loopy with affection; I could turn her upside down.

Tonight, lifting requires strategy and cooperation: She sits at the edge of my bed, wraps her arms around my neck and her legs around my waist, and on the count of three I step back and she holds on tight. My lower back complains, which it did not used to do, but we make it down the hall, Sarah squealing, "You can do it, Mommy," and I drop her backward on her bed.

She gets under the covers, I slide in next to her, and she tells me I should not go to New York tomorrow morning. We have this conversation every time I go, and I was wrong to think that it would get easier as she got older. Sarah clearly has inherited her father's high school debate-team gene and believes that she can talk me out of what I have to do. Resolved: There is nothing so compelling that it can come between us.

I say the same things I always say: lucky that I only go once in a while. Nice that daddy works at home. None of it makes a dent, and I don't blame her. Life is not a consolation prize. Lunch an hour from now is useless when a child is hungry, and almost home does not help if she is tired. Back on Tuesday means nothing when I will be gone for the six days between now and then.

I could act like leaving is no big deal and hope that she follows my lead, but who wants to raise a stoic? I pat the place where teachers still tell kids their hearts are. "You know," I say, "it's like me and my daddy. He's always with me here, even though he isn't around anymore. And I am always, always with you, no matter where I am."

That's good. Reassure her by bringing up a dead parent. Luckily, she is too young to be morbid. For her, my father is shorthand for great parent, the kind of guy who still makes a strong impression twelve years after the cigarettes won.

"Mommy," she finally replies, "I would rather be with you forever than own a horse."

Sarah would rather have a horse than breathe. "When I'm mad at you it won't feel that way," she goes on. "But it will still be true."

Mad at me? I was happy being better than a horse. I do not look forward to being the object of her scorn — and for the first time, I realize that there may be no way to avoid it.

A woman I barely know had come by a few weeks earlier to salvage my spindly rosebushes, a favor she dispatched with a quick display of five-leaf pruning and a stern lecture about horticultural neglect. Then she settled in for a cup of tea and the real fun, an unsolicited appraisal of my relationship with Sarah. I do not know her well enough to recall her teenage daughter's name, nor did she observe us long enough for her tea to grow cold, but that did not stop her. The specifics of our life were frankly beside the point. She had a universal truth to impart.

Life between a mother and a teenage girl gets as bad as it once was good, she said, and then, if the mother is fortunate, the girl takes off altogether.

This was not the first time I had been so warned. Women who said such things always had daughters who were old enough to drive, and their girls were rarely around when they made the prediction, having driven to the mall, the movie theater, a friend's house — the destination far less important to them than the ability to get there. They were elsewhere, which was all that mattered, while Sarah still wrapped herself around my shoulder like a vine.

The visiting mom seemed quite relieved to have been left in the dust, since lately being in the same room with her daughter involved a level of histrionics she found intolerable.

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