Years ago in yoga therapy school, a teacher told us a story, whether folklore, tradition, or simply a very wise parent’s fantasy, I’ve never been able to verify it, that somewhere in India, families sent adolescents away for a while during the wild hormonal years. At the time, I remember thinking it sounded a little extreme. I now have two middle school daughters. I’m having second thoughts.
Not really, of course. But if you’ve ever raised girls, or perhaps simply stood near someone raising girls, you’ve probably heard the predictions. Just wait until they’re teenagers. People say it with the confidence of meteorologists tracking a Category 5 hurricane. Sunny through elementary school, with a significant hormonal system moving in sometime around seventh grade. Expect dramatic sighing, eye rolling, doors slamming, and a 90 percent chance of “Fiiiiiiinnnnnneeeaaaaah.” If you currently live with a teenager, you know the word. It began its life as fine, a perfectly respectable four letter word meaning all is well, but somewhere around middle school it acquired several additional vowels, at least three new syllables and a completely different meaning, roughly translated as, I have heard you, I profoundly disagree with the necessity of what you are asking, and I would like this conversation to end immediately.
My husband and I heard some version of this almost from the moment we started having daughters. Three girls, close in age? Oh boy. Just wait. There would be jealousy. Drama. Fighting. Hormones. And apparently at some point, all three of these children who crawled into our laps, followed us into the bathroom, and once considered us the leading authorities on virtually everything would discover that we had somehow become deeply embarrassing people with very little understanding of how the world actually works.
We decided fairly early that we weren’t going to accept that as inevitable. This may prove to be breathtakingly naive. Ask me again in three years.
We did, however, prepare. I have studied science my entire adult life, so I am under no illusion that hormones are imaginary, and I know adolescence is a very real biological and developmental transition. But I never loved the idea that we should simply expect our sweet little girls to disappear into some hormonal abyss for six years and hope recognizable adults eventually emerge. So when the girls were little, I started pointing out the stereotypical teenage stance when we saw it, the hunched shoulders, crossed arms, dramatic face, the general physical presentation of someone who has just been informed that life is unbearable because her mother asked her to clean up after herself. They learned to recognize it. We laughed about it. And the word “fine,” or what would eventually evolve into “Fiiiiiiinnnnnneeeaaaaah,” became something of a family event. “I’m fine.” “That’s fine.” “Everything is fine.” We all know that absolutely nothing good has ever followed those particular uses of the word fine.
I also developed another parenting strategy, although I’m fairly certain this one does not appear in the official literature.
Catholic guilt.
Years ago, my brother in law, who is a child psychologist, told me that I seemed to have such a good grasp on parenting and asked what I was doing. Please, he said, share your wisdom.
I told him the truth.
Catholic guilt.
I explained that I had been quietly instilling just enough of it since birth that when one of my children eventually had a brief lapse into teenage meanness or moodiness and I responded with a calm, “That’s fine,” “I’m fine,” or the particularly effective, “Everything is fine,” her internal guilt bells would begin ringing. The Catholic guilt would seep into the crevices of the adolescent ego, she would remember that she actually loves me, and before long I would have a massively apologetic child standing in front of me.
“Please tell me you’re kidding,” he said. “I don’t want to hear this.”
I wasn’t. Works like a charm.
Right, Mom?
Obviously, I’m joking. Mostly. But underneath the joking has always been something I take very seriously. I have never wanted to accept the idea that adolescence has to mean losing our children. They are supposed to separate from us. They are supposed to question us, challenge us, develop their own opinions and begin practicing the autonomy they will eventually need to live without us. I want that for them. What I don’t want is to confuse independence with disconnection, theirs from me or theirs from one another.
There is no parenting handbook. I realize there are approximately nine million books about parenting, but that is not the same thing. Nobody hands you your baby and says, “Here is the manual. Follow pages 1 through 437 and she will become a happy, kind, emotionally healthy adult who calls you voluntarily.” Most of us begin with what we know. We look backward at the people who raised us, carry some things forward and quietly swear never to repeat others. We watch other families. We read. We listen. We improvise. We make mistakes. Occasionally we congratulate ourselves on getting something spectacularly right, usually moments before one of our children provides compelling evidence that we have absolutely no idea what we are doing.
Somewhere in all of that improvisation, we are also supposed to figure out what we are actually trying to do.
I’ve been thinking about that lately because people say, “I want to have children,” all the time, but I’m not sure how often we ask the next question.
Why do we want them?
Maybe we imagine the emotional fulfillment of having a family and the extraordinary love that can come with it. Maybe we want to leave something of ourselves behind, some sense of legacy or purpose that reaches beyond our own lifetime. And maybe, if we’re willing to be completely honest, some of us simply grew up absorbing the idea that this is what life is supposed to look like. You grow up, fall in love, get married, have children. Family expectations, cultural expectations, community expectations and generations of people asking newly married couples when they are going to “start a family” have a way of making one particular version of adulthood feel inevitable.
There is nothing inherently wrong with any of those reasons, and most of us probably arrive at parenthood carrying some complicated mixture of love, longing, biology, hope, expectation, family history and ideas we inherited long before we ever stopped to examine them. But once the children are actually here, once the hypothetical family has become real human beings with personalities and opinions and an astonishing ability to require three different dinners on the same night, the question changes. We wanted children. Now what exactly are we hoping for them?
Of course I want my daughters to become good human beings, kind, compassionate, capable, brave, contributing members of society. I want them to find work that matters to them, relationships that nourish them and lives that feel like their own. But those are all things I want them to be, and lately I’ve found myself wondering about a slightly different question: What do I want for them? When I really sit with it, I think my answer is belonging. I want them to move through the world knowing that being independent does not mean being alone, that they can be perfectly comfortable standing on their own while also knowing that on the days when they don’t want to, or simply cannot, there is someone who will stand beside them.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve told my girls that one of the greatest gifts they have been given is each other. When they were little, I used to read them the Flicka, Ricka, Dicka books, stories about three little sisters. One of those books was Flicka, Ricka, Dicka and the Three Kittens, and I loved that image of three little sisters and three little kittens so much that when we moved into our house, I did what any completely reasonable mother would do and got my three little girls three little kittens. Apparently I was not content merely to read the metaphor. I needed to move it into the house.
Looking back, I realize I have probably been doing some version of that their entire lives. I wasn’t only raising three daughters. I was watching three relationships being born, and somewhere along the way I began to feel responsible for those relationships too. I have to believe I’m not the only mother who does this. We know intellectually that our children belong to themselves, yet we spend years trying to cultivate something between them. Share with your sister. Include your sister. Be kind to your sister. Apologize to your sister. Your sister is not actually trying to ruin your life because she borrowed your sweatshirt. Your sister is also not committing a human rights violation because she walked into your room to ask you a simple question. We referee arguments that make absolutely no sense to anyone over the age of fourteen because somewhere underneath the immediate insanity, we are thinking much farther ahead than they are.
At least I am. They may be arguing about who touched whose charger. I am apparently already imagining Thanksgiving 2057.
This is why I’ve started noticing something peculiar about myself. The things I probably should get angry about often don’t bother me nearly as much as the things that do. One Friday night around ten o’clock, one of my daughters was emptying the dishwasher when a glass slipped from her hand and shattered everywhere. I was exhausted. I had reached that point in the evening when I wanted nothing more from humanity except for everyone to stop needing things from me so I could go to bed, and now there was glass everywhere. Somehow, though, I wasn’t angry. I desperately wanted to sleep, but a glass is a glass. We cleaned it up. Nobody was hurt. Life continued.
Let two of my daughters start tearing into each other, however, and my entire nervous system becomes involved. My skin crawls. My shoulders tighten. Suddenly I care with an intensity wildly disproportionate to whatever is actually happening, which may very well be an argument about a hairbrush. I’ve started to understand why their fighting affects me so differently. A broken glass is a broken glass, but when my daughters are unkind to each other, it touches a fear in me that broken things simply don’t: What if they aren’t close someday? What if this relationship I have imagined for them, the three of them calling each other, laughing together and showing up when life gets hard, doesn’t happen? What if they grow up and become women who love each other but barely know each other? What if there are old resentments, misunderstandings or distances I cannot repair for them? And then comes the thought that is harder to admit because mothers have an extraordinary ability to locate ourselves at the scene of crimes that have not even occurred yet: What if somehow I failed to teach them how to stay connected?
I suspect I’m not the only mother who carries some version of that fear. We are told constantly to prepare our children to leave us. Teach them independence. Teach them resilience. Give them roots and wings. Let them go. All of that is true, but there is another hope that I think some of us carry alongside it, one that almost contradicts the first. Go. Become yourself. Build a life that belongs entirely to you. And please, somehow, still belong to one another.
That’s the part of parenting nobody can promise us. I can nurture their relationships, but I cannot guarantee them. I can create opportunities for connection, but I cannot manufacture closeness. I can teach kindness, repair, forgiveness, loyalty and compassion, and I can continue my highly sophisticated program of Catholic guilt, but eventually these children become adults and their relationships belong to them. Maybe one of the hardest parts of parenting is realizing that we spend decades trying to shape something we ultimately have to release, and adolescence may be where that lesson really begins.
My daughters are reaching the ages everyone warned me about, and yes, things are changing. There are moods and opinions and independence. There are times they want me and times they very clearly do not. There are conversations they bring to me and others I know are theirs alone. There are moments when I have to remind myself that closeness does not require access to every thought in their heads because God knows I certainly would not have wanted my mother rummaging around in mine at thirteen.
I’m also discovering that maybe the goal was never to keep the door between us permanently open. Maybe the goal is to become someone they trust enough to open it for when it counts.
An older man in our neighborhood once told me why he had loved living here for so many years. He said the neighbors gave each other space. Nobody was constantly in anyone else’s business. People lived their lives. But when something happened, when somebody was sick or frightened or struggling or truly needed help, people showed up.
“When it counts,” he said.
I’ve never forgotten that, and maybe that is the kind of mother I want to become as my daughters grow older. I don’t want to hover outside the door demanding entry every time it closes. I want them to know who is on the other side of it. I want them to know that if something goes wrong, really wrong, they can tell me. Even if I won’t like it. Even if they made a mistake. Even if they know I will be disappointed. Even if they begin with those familiar words, “Mom, you’re going to be mad.” I want them to come through the door anyway, because when it counts, I would much rather be the mother who gets the phone call than the mother whose child was too afraid to make it.
And maybe that is what I hope they eventually become for one another too.
I don’t need my daughters to be inseparable, although I have to keep reminding myself of that because apparently the woman who bought three kittens to coordinate with her three daughters may have some tendencies. I don’t need them to agree. I don’t need them to choose the same lives, live in the same town, talk every day or recreate some movie version of sisterhood I’ve been carrying around in my head. They are allowed to become completely different women, and if I have done my job well, I hope they do. I just hope that underneath all those differences lives something durable, some quiet knowing that if I need you, I can call, if something falls apart, you will come, and if the world gets very dark, I don’t have to stand in it alone.
After nearly thirteen years of motherhood, in this experiment for which I remain incredibly offended that no instruction manual was provided, I realize I want something beyond raising good people. I want to help raise three women who know how to love one another while still allowing each other to become fully themselves. I want them to know how to disagree without destroying, how to repair after hurting each other, how to give each other room, how to come back and how to recognize that closeness does not have to mean sameness.
Whether I can actually give them that, I don’t know, and maybe that is the question underneath this whole thing: How much of our children’s future actually belongs to us?
We don’t get to write the ending. We get these years, the carpools and dinners and soccer fields and swim meets, the fights and apologies, the broken glasses at ten o’clock when all we want to do is go to bed, the ridiculous laughter, the eye rolls, the occasional “Fiiiiiiinnnnnneeeaaaaah” echoing from somewhere upstairs, and apparently this new developmental phase in which perfectly intelligent, athletic children can transform into physical, mental and emotional zombies the instant a phone enters their hands, wandering through the house with their heads hanging forward, their posture collapsing by the minute, responding “Huh?” to a question you have now asked four times while simultaneously insisting that yes, they heard you the first time. We get the doors that close and, hopefully, the doors that open again. We get to model what love looks like when it is irritated and tired and imperfect, and we get to show them that relationships can bend without breaking. We get to plant what we can, knowing that eventually we have to step back and trust what grows.
Someday I won’t be here, and that isn’t something I say with sadness. It is simply part of the deal, another paragraph that apparently was missing from the parenting handbook. When that day eventually comes, I don’t need my daughters to spend their lives looking backward for me.
I hope they look sideways and find each other.