Thursday, July 15, 2010

Help! My Teenager Didn't Turn Out Quite Like I'd Planned

(Originally published Spring 2010, Your Teen Magazine)


This is so not how I thought it would turn out.

I didn’t want a daughter as a shopping mate. Or to practice fancy hairstyles. In fact, I still haven’t quite perfected those skills myself. No, my daughter and I were going to lob tennis balls while discussing the classics. Jane Austen. Tolstoy. And perhaps a little Danielle Steele thrown in for good gossipy measure.

Or so this is what I imagined when the doctor placed this beautiful bundle-of-reading-potential-joy in my arms on February 3, 1996.

The experts say to model reading behavior if you want your child to love reading. So I read while breastfeeding. I read while making dinner. I read while breastfeeding and making dinner, as only we multi-tasking supermoms know how to do. You want modeling? I was Kate Moss with reading glasses.

The experts also recommend reading aloud to your intended bibliophile. And so I read to her while making Play-Doh. I read to her while playing in the sandbox and at the playground. You get the picture. I did everything by the ironic book, which we mature moms now know doesn’t exist. We are well aware that The Official Book on Childrearing is obsolete because it seems the inconsistent subject matter called kids alters the standard advice.

The day she read her first very own sentence, I immediately dragged a chair down the attic stairs for a featured spot in her bedroom. “This is your reading chair!,” I boomed. “You will go great places in this chair! China! Indonesia! You will follow a freaky talking rabbit down a hole and land in weird places with more freaky characters!

I think I may have scared her.

She read. A little. Got good grades. But really enjoyed her hair. And shopping. And pretty, sparkly things. Everything I did not. And the reading chair became a place to deposit all these shiny, sparkly things.

“Mom, about that reading chair,” my then 10-year-old daughter said one day as she bounded down the stairs with her perfectly coiffed hairdo. “Yes?” I asked expectantly, hoping she was up for a trip to the library. “The fabric selection sucks,” said she.

So I gave it up, just as my award-winning athletic sister learned to do one beautiful fall day while prodding her young son to join her in a football toss. (This is the same boy who had heretofore decided the dirt baseball infield was a much better canvas for drawing monsters with random sticks, as opposed to catching careening hard balls.) As the football lofted through his skinny outstretched arms and landed in a pile of leaves, he exclaimed, “Mom! Look at these amazing leaves! Let’s go make a collage!” As she tells it, that’s the day she put away not only the football but her expectations. She saw the football; he saw the leaves.

A funny thing about these things called Parental Expectations. No matter how hard we try to hide them, the kids know they’re there. And not always, but something often happens when we parents put away our expectations. The kids want them back. But on their own terms.

It has happened a bit with my teenage girl. I’m not going to lie and say she’s a junior literature professor. But she reads a little and likes it. And the minute I stopped talking about tennis, she started. She plays on her school team and I feign interested indifference. Just last week she asked me to volley with her, but I was too tired. (Note: I was 14 years younger when I thought we’d make a good pair.)

More importantly, I have learned that adventures are not always reserved for reading chairs and young children. They are all mine, thanks to my daughter’s wisdom. I now notice the silk knotted fabric trim on fancy restaurant chairs. The world of hair straightening products has been mine to discover. And don’t even get me started on Project Runway!

When we love our kids for who they are, we learn a few things about ourselves. This is so not how I thought it would turn out. It’s better.