Strap in for teen years

PETA JOHANSEN MUMMABARE

I SWEAR it wasn’t so long ago that she got my attention by wrapping her little arms around my legs, wiping her sweaty curls and perpetuallychocolate-covered face on to my pants so that I would pick her up and she would cuddle me with all her might.

She still does that – but now when she hugs me her long arms travel around my waist. She still squeezes like she’s wrestling a crocodile.

And when she hugs me, it’s not because she has tripped or because her brother stole her toy ... it’s because she has made a poor choice.

She struggles now with the weight of her independence and grapples with her own shortcomings.

She’s sworn at a sibling in front of a friend; she’s snuck in some screen time when she was meant to be sleeping; she’s taken out her pre-adolescent anger on an unsuspecting friend/relative/me.

So the fight is more fraught with my indecision about the best course of action, it’s less about discipline than it is about educating her. It takes so much longer.

In the time it takes me to admonish her or guide her, she has rolled her eyes, or worse, talked back, and I feel indignant, trying to instil good values in someone who clearly just wants to be a brat.

Boy, it makes me mad. It makes me quarrel back, makes me say things just to assert my place as her guardian.

Makes me say “because I f***ing said so!”

Makes me send her to her room where she will howl loud enough for me to hear from the other side of the house. With my headphones on. The neighbours must think someone has died.

No – I just took her ipad. I can see in her tear-filled eyes the challenge to best my authority with her loud cries of injustice.

I miss when she cried because she hurt her knee. Simple consolations are dealt with more ease than this caterwaul of contempt for her mother.

This is it. This is the start of the teenage years, I tell myself. Better strap myself in.

Because for all her shrieking, swearing, eye-rolling condemnation that she delivers, I’ll be trying to hold that space.

Give her enough room to rebel, but walls to push against.

Because when she’s done fighting, she comes back for the cuddle, where there is no space between us.