Debunking assumptions about adolescence

By the time kindergarten rolled around the following fall, I was smug enough about my separation technique to feel superior to the parents who simply dropped their kids off for the first day of school. I knew better. I milled around the yard with Sarah — for the record, I wasn't the only one — and when the kindergarten teacher asked everyone to line up, I dutifully took my place behind my only child. Then the teacher announced, "The parents can leave now, because we're going inside. We have work to do," and I stepped out of line. Elementary school had new rules of disengagement — and no, Sarah did not glance back at me as she marched into the building.

The stakes got higher after that. I have left Sarah at school, at friends' houses, at the bus for the annual out-of-town class trip. So what if I secretly rejoiced at her lack of interest in sleep-away camp? I took her where she needed to go, and I smiled and waved with the other adults. I am a high-functioning parent. I do what I am supposed to do, and nobody sees the effort.

Adolescene is the Oylmpics of separation events; everything so far has been but a training program for the big developmental break, and I do not feel prepared. To my left, the worn road to embittered, the place where those mothers live who always wonder why you don't call more often, even when you call more often. To my right, the mysterious road to someplace better, for which the American Automobile Association has not yet published TripTiks. The rosebush mom was half right: Children do grow up and go away, and the pace in our household is about to pick up. I understand that big changes are coming. It is the pitched-battle part of her narrative that leaves me cold.

Sarah's childhood was such easy bliss, as I looked over my shoulder at its departing form. It was codependence at its finest. I was omnipotent and wise, she was needful and charming, and there was relatively little back talk. Daily life was full of the smallest of firsts — that bottom tooth, a scrupulously peeled inaugural apple wedge, the ringlet I had in a drawer someplace, an early Sarah written with a backward r-that were no less remarkable for being duplicated in billions of other households in the known universe.

It is hard to let go. Not chronic-depression hard. More like a squall: It hits and it passes. If I do a good job of being the mother of an adolescent, I guarantee myself only a temporarily broken heart. If I do a bad job, it could be much worse. I frankly haven't given much thought yet to what constitutes a good job in the next phase, but this business about her being mad at me someday got my attention.

I should be grateful for the early alert. Sarah is ten, a new tween — which, by the way, is what we called ourselves a lifetime ago, even though some millennial advertising type swears he invented the label and discovered the target audience. She is on the road to being a teenager. I have three years to get my act together.

In the newsroom parlance, if it bleeds, it leads. That is why the story about the teenage sniper runs at the opening of the newscast and the story about the altruistic students who tutor children with learning disabilities comes way after weather and sports. Stories about kids in between, the normal, run-of-the-mill ones, never run at all. We eat anguish for breakfast, and adolescent girls provide a lot of the fodder.

The public consensus is that they are a collective pain in the neck. They weigh far too little or far too much, they steal the car keys and the credit card, they lie through their orthodontured teeth about where they went and with whom, they hate themselves and their parents and the girls above or below them in the pecking order, and they think that oral sex is merely a southern-hemisphere version of a good-night kiss. They dress like tramps. They drink and smoke and spill booze and ash on the shoes they forgot to mention they were going to borrow. Their poor parents usually express helpless bewilderment, like folks who just watched a tornado take the roof off the house and hurl the pickup truck into the bedroom wall. Why, only yesterday, they say, my daughter looked like that sweet little cherub in the photo on the piano.

Excerpted from “My Girl: Adventures of a Teen in Training” by Karen Stabiner. Copyright © 2005 by Karen Stabiner. Published by Little Brown and Company, a division of Time Warner Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt can be used without permission of the publisher.

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